Investigating lighting in deconstructivist spaces

ABSTRACT: Style of the built environment inform greatly about the character of the spaces as the environments for every moment of human life. Deconstructivism is one of these styles, which for the built environments can be said to be characterized by fragmentation, a tendency in manipulating a structure's surface, non-rectilinear shapes which appear to distort and dislocate elements of architecture such as structure and envelope. The resultant visual appearance of buildings of deconstructivist style is characterized by unpredictability and controlled chaos, in a way. Lighting, on the other hand is another very important tool in the creation of the character of spaces; whether natural or artificial. This Master thesis will concentrate on the place of lighting in the creation of characteristic implementation of deconstructivism, as a style, for buildings. Significance will be attached to the integration, design decisions and details of lighting in regards to cooperation with overall aspects of docontructivist buildings, with an emphasis on the creation of the spatial character. Due to the complex design that comes with the deconstructivist approach, delicate thought is needed to solve lighting issues for the interiors, as the irregular structuring may force lighting decisions to suit the main infrastructure of the interior itself, or, it is the lighting decisions that help highlight the ideals; and this is one of the main issues that the thesis focuses on. The main aim of the thesis is to observe and analyze how solutions for lighting effects have been incorporated within deconstructivist spaces. The main body of the research contains a literature review that focuses on the significance of lighting and the general basis of deconstructivism as a design style; the main background knowledge of the thesis is covered within the literature review that is the main support in the analysis and evaluation of the case studies. The main method that is used within the thesis is a qualitative research, with support of visual images and known facts on deconstructivist designs and lighting solutions. The main limitation of the study is the variety and number of projects that could have been evaluated; therefore five pioneer architects of deconstructivist design have been chosen for the evaluation with their most prominent designs. Location has been another issue to avoid this issue. The building, which has received major attention of the design circles of the architects, had been chosen. The evaluations had been done through criteria based analysis, which has been derived from the literature review, on how deconstructivist spatial character had been achieved and how lighting had been integrated with the overall design of these deconstructivist buildings. Keywords: Deconstructivist style, Interior Space, Spatial Character, Effects of Lighting, Style-Lighting Relationship. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………