The project is involves remaking of the Neo-futuristic American architect John Portman’s spectacular hotel which was built in1987. The existing hotel offered the ideal stage for the reinvention of the atrium hotel, with bringing the garden into the atrium.
The challenges of lighting design involves introducing layers of light in the impressive atrium space, working with limited existing lighting points, integrating the new and old elements and also the trees and planting scheme unto the cascading planters. The atrium receives limited daylight exposure and posed challenges to the survival of the trees and plants. While grow lights are definitely required to supports the growth of the garden, achieving certain technical requirements of photosynthetic active radiation levels, the general concern of how the exposed grow lights will co-exist with the hotel guests and even complement the ambience for the hotel. The lighting concept thus challenges this and using very controlled optics, high RA9, colour rendering and tunable white solution of the grow lights, we are able to create the atmosphere of being in the forest in the daytime in 3800K, while evening approaches, the lighting ambience transforms into an atmospheric garden at 3100K. The lighting level changes throughout the day, responding to the natural lighting environment and the needs of the greenery. The grow lights double up to support growth and form part of the overall scenes and ambience of the atrium, which was originally too dark before the renovation.
The interior architectural lighting also involves the overall lighting in the reception, atrium space, in addition to the landscape lighting. The opportunity of giving new light to the American artist, Richard Lippold’s suspended sculpture, Orchidea, and turning in into a light art show interaction with the metallic forms of the sculpture and bringing life to the atrium each evening, hourly from 7pm to 9 pm. Overall lighting concept strives to enhance and complement the built form versus the soft forms of nature, with views from the bridge, the all-day dining restaurant, and from the atrium.
