Singapore university research centre ceiling consists of "6,000 moveable lights"
Inside Festival 2014: architect and professor Sawako Kaijima explains how she created a research and gallery space with "completely diffused lighting" in our next exclusive movie from this year's Inside Festival.
IDC Space, which won the Display category at Inside Festival this year, is a research hub and exhibition gallery at the Singapore University of Technology and Design.
The entire ceiling of the 13- by 16-metre space is filled with hanging LED lights, which can be independently lowered or raised.
"The entire design that I've provided is actually this illuminating display ceiling," Kaijima says in the movie, which was filmed at Inside Festival 2014 in Singapore. "There are about 6,000 lights and one can easily move the height of these elements."
She adds: "It makes completely diffused lighting, so there's absolutely no shadow in the space. You can move, rotate, reconfigure space and still everything looks evenly lit, which is kind of a new experience. I've never had this experience before."
Kaijima designed the LED-powered lamps specially for the project to ensure the space was completely evenly lit.
"I designed a custom light for this made from polycarbonate," she explains. "It houses the super low-powered LEDs. Then we used a lot of simulation tools to design custom lenses to bring the light downwards."
Although the ceiling is entirely made from lights, it's is still possible to suspend objects from it.
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"All the lights have a loop at the end so you can hang objects up to 10kg," Kaijima explains.
The university is moving to a new campus next year, so the whole ceiling system was designed to be relocatable.
"All the major investment had to be relocatable," Kaijima says. "The idea was to have a very flexible, re-configurable space."
Inside Festival took place at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore from 1 to 3 October. Award entries for next year's festival are open from February 2015.
We'll be publishing interviews with all the category winners from this year's event over the coming weeks. You can watch all the movies below.