Brilliant

Client: V&A Museum

Location: London

Year: 2004

Done in partnership with Shona Kitchen, as Kitchen Rogers Design

Brief: To design an exhibition exploring contemporary uses and effects of light, via a wide range of luminaire fixtures and installations, covering everything from the strictly functional to the wildly fanciful.

Our design response introduced a series of connecting chambers as a singular, stand alone installation within to the historic interior of the museum. Cladding the walls in high gloss white laminate to emphasise the delicacy of the light and shadow produced, we designed each volume around the specific piece on display, creating highly experiential spaces where visitors could be immersed in the effects of the light, enjoying its lyrical potential as a design material.

In creating the series of interlocking spaces as independent volumes, we were able to finely control light levels for each of the installations, generating a sense of interior within an interior. We explored the contrast effects of different surface qualities where the white, reflective enclosures, animated through light, met the matte, absorbent gallery space.

The internal height of the chambers rose and fell, dramatising the lighting effect contained within. By introducing a network of independent walls and ceilings within the gallery as whole we were able to offer an alternative external route for visitors, who could glimpse the contents of individual chambers through cut-outs in the walls.