The architect and owner of the “Crazy House” contacted us and asked us to design a permanent art lighting installation that would make the night as crazy as her creation, as well as to extend the opening hours after 6 p.m. The site is a mash-up of nature and fairy architecture, with giant creatures emerging from the landscape. As a result, it was obvious that we needed to extend this storytelling approach with a cinematographic lighting concept.
We began by imagining a storyboard of the visitor’s path using references from fantastic and horror cinema, in which the light provides all of the dramatic and magical effects that we intended to translate into the project. We sequenced the park in several scenes, similar to a movie, where the lighting offers various ambiance and emotions, with dynamic programming, which allows us to suddenly immerse the park in a unique atmosphere with a highly dramatic effect.
Our challenge was to hide the equipment so that the magic of the night could be preserved while not interfering with the park’s daytime view. We overcame this limitation by gathering as many luminaires as possible onto just two masts, which were meticulously installed to reach all of our targets with RGB LED flood lights and gobo projectors. The remaining luminaires were almost unit-by-unit adapted and integrated into the architecture and landscape, with an intense period of mock-up and testing on-site. We experimented with integrating LED strip lights in concrete mesh tubes to illuminate the 180 meters of stairs, fiber optics in concrete rock ceilings, UV flood lights in real trees, and bulky gobo projectors in a decorative fake tree. The client expressed her delight at having finally found a lighting designer who could be deeply involved and understand the specificity of her wishes, as opposed to the standard lighting solutions she had tried in the past.