Lighting in Design Q3 2019

they are essentially the same company, they needed to appear as separate for product branding. Part of the solutionwas splitting the two by floor and aligning the corporate identity accordingly.” The lighting design was critical to the interior, especially in the spaces where the architects were able to embellish a little more, such as the reception spaces, meeting rooms and in the large communal kitchen area in which the staff can congregate, eat or even work in a more relaxed environment. “We started with a high end design, and one of the big challenges was trimming that design back to budget whilst still maintaining the same kind of appearance. A hierarchy of the spaces can be seen in the chosen finishes, most notably in terms of the lighting. This included picking the right light fittings, surfacemount- ing them instead of cutting into the ceilings and recessing them, without going completely overboard with bulkheads. We used several pendant lights, hung at different heights, and picked the fittings very carefully to complement the exterior, thus many of the fittings that were picked have a geometric and angular concrete finish,” says Rassmann. The main lighting directive was reducing en- ergy consumption, thus the use of LEDs, yet at the same time, the lighting concept was informed by the striking lines across the façade. “This we echoed in the lighting design with long, thin LED linears,” Rassmann notes. Lighting was limited on the façade to security uplighters, as the designers wanted the building to ‘glow’ from within through the double volume glass entrance. Lighting chal- lenges experienced on the project included the fact that time and cost constraints dictated that much of the lighting had to be surface mounted rather than recessed, as well as getting staff to understand and use the motion activated lights correctly. Glass played a large part in the interior due to the high ceiling volumes of the space. “We had to get the balance right between glass and dry wall partitioning,” explains Lacovig. “With glass costing close on seven times as much as drywall partition- ing, we raised certain portions of the drywall parti- tioning to hide the desks and the assorted cabling,

finishes, such as striped, colourful carpets mixed with more muted tones so it is not too heavy on the eye,” he says. The architects brought through a fair amount of patterning to follow the diagonal geometries of the façade, working with different carpet colours to create visual interest. “The advantage of having one company dealing with both, is that you have a better sense of under- standing the conceptual design of the building, and can bring that thread right through into the interior which gives you a better product at the end of the day,” says Rassmann.The interior doesn’t disregard the exterior, and vice versa. “The way interior and exterior intersect is very conscious,” explains Alessio Lacovig. “We haven’t hidden the concrete structure within the building; you can see how the ceiling edges have been stepped back to expose the underside of the concrete slab and you see the concrete beams perforating the ceiling and glass façade to intersect the columns and support the floor slab, making the expression of the structure visible from the office interior. Rassmann notes that the project presented an interesting scenario, as there are two companies that run internally – the logistics company for pet products and an e-Pet store.This new head office is the amal- gamation of two Johannesburg operations, with the third still located in Durban. “We had to incorporate the two companieswithin the one building, andwhile

9

LiD Q3 - 2019