The UK14 in the heart of Kassel is a place that combines art, culture, education, meeting, economy and work and has become a playground for the future. The new permanent address for children’s, youth and school theater is an open house that can do much more beyond its main use and function flexibly.
For this open house, we implemented an inviting lighting atmosphere in harmony with the existing architecture.
The theatre area impresses with a powerful play of light and shadow with deliberately set contrasts, high dimming qualities and with modern lighting control system via DMX for the best possible flexibility.
In the office area, high-quality and sustainable lighting solutions are used in combination with daylight and motion sensors. Lighting design and lighting guidance are oriented to the existing architecture and try to stage it in the best possible way according to our guideline “light instead of luminaires”.
Architecture, design and light are decisive factors in creating a high-quality overall ensemble. It is all about making employees feel at home and making the quality of light and architecture their own.
In addition to the architectural lighting for the areas, office and cultural buildings, this project qualifies with 3 sophisticated artistic objects in the field of light art. The interactive works take visitors from the real world into the fictional world of staging and fantasy.
A 7x4m neon tube light installation welcomes visitors to the building as a dance movement frozen into form.
The form was determined by light paintings that were created from long-term exposures of a ballerina dancing with light brushes – movement sequences with which children and young people experiment in the dance studio located in the basement.
In the theatre foyer visitors are greeted by a circular mirror surface 3 metres in diameter, broken down as a triptych. The sculpture allows the view back into the hall.
As the number of visitors and movement in the room increases, a second design level of the installation is activated. An intermittent glow begins to bathe the mirrored room in coloured light until it is able to dissolve it completely with increasing luminosity. This creates a dynamic interplay of reflection and glow, the boundaries of which escape the eye and thus compose the plane of reflection and that of the play of light into a spectacle with an intangible depth effect.
Controllable RGB video pixels create a mist of light that cannot be located.
In front of the stage and rehearsal rooms a professionally illuminated Selfispot invites posing and experimenting.
