We were asked the question “What inspires you?” by Light Collective who curate the back page of the leading international lighting design magazine Mondo Arc.  A page in the December/January edition of the magazine was given over for the response.

So what does inspire us? And moreover, how do we communicate this for the world to see? When presented with great challenges such as this we did what we always do – made some tea and talked about it. At some length! We agreed that collaboration is the most important aspect of our approach to work and central to our inspiration. But how to communicate this?

We also wanted our response to be representative of where we’re from – Mondo Arc is an international publication after all and we are very proud Melbournians!

We eventually arrived at the old saying “many hands make light work” and knew that this was it; we had it. Next thing was to figure out how to express this. Someone said “with light, of course”. Next thing we had the gobo catalogue out, found a theatre projector, identified a location (just HAD  to be Melbourne’s world famous Hosier Lane), teed up one of Melbourne’s best photographers Matt Irwin, designed and had fabricated a neon sign, hired a generator and headed to site one evening, praying we wouldn’t fall foul of the weather or City of Melbourne by-laws inspectors (we had enough to organise without getting a permit to shoot as well!).

We were really pleased with the result – hope you like it too.  See the digital edition and go to page 178 to see it for yourself.

Many hands make light work

Setting up

Trials and tweaks

I had the pleasure on Friday night of attending the Victorian chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects awards presentation dinner.

AAMI Park pretty much swept the board winning the Victorian Architectural Medal, The William Wardle Award for Public Architecture, the Colorbond Award for Steel in Architecture and the Melbourne Prize.  Our congratulation to Cox Architects and everybody associated with the project.

500 Bourke Street also did very well winning the Commercial Architecture award and the Joseph Reed Award for urban design.  Congratulations to John Wardle Architects.

For us both projects represented considerable technical and aesthetic challenges.  The integration of light in both projects was particularly pleasing and we are delighted to have played a small part in the overall success of each project.

AAMI Park

Last night I had the privilege of presenting our design work on the AAMI Park stadium to the Victorian chapter of the IES.

Despite howling wind and driving rain, an amazing 100 people turned up to hear presentations about the artistic feature lighting, architectural lighting to the stadium and the sports lighting.  The credit for such a great turn-out needs to be largely attributed to the superb work of chapter president Adele Locke.  Adele has worked tirelessly towards the development of the Victorian chapter and has made the chapter technical meetings a cornerstone of any lighting enthusiast’s diary.

We were also especially proud last night when our very own Dave Anderson was announced Vice President of the chapter to succeed Adele in 2013.  Dave has big shoes to fill.

Last night we collected the inaugural Melbourne Design Award for our lighting design to AAMI Park Stadium.

This award programme differs from most of the other industry awards in that the winners are decided by the voting public both from within the design industry and the general public.  Our entry attracted 608 votes and this was enough for us to take out the award in the lighting category.

We feel humbled that our work has been recognised in this way.

And the winner is...