Architect Magazine features the work of OVI & Zaha Hadid at The Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art

The work outlines how lighting designs can move the architectural design.  This project features fixtures from a few different manufacturers and allows OVI and Zaha Hadid Architects to design and build something unique for the Cincinnati, OH community.

“The Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art (CAC) is a series of firsts: Zaha Hadid’s first building in the United States, her first project on an urban site, her first museum, and her first collaboration with lighting design firm Office for Visual Interaction (OVI). From the beginning of the project, OVI, founded by principals Jean Sundin and Enrique Peiniger, set out to determine the project’s fundamental architectural statement and how to express that with light. “We wanted to know the vocabulary and visual metaphors,” explains Peiniger.

Reinforcing the sense of movement inherent in Hadid’s architecture, the approach of the building’s lighting scheme is, as Sundin characterizes it, one of “dynamic acceleration.” Throughout the building, luminaires are spaced to create “a moving dynamic that runs along the length of the glass façade.” This occurs in the lobby, for example, where the line between interior and exterior space disintegrates through the double-height glass curtain wall, and the city grid is pulled into the building and transformed from horizontal (floor) to vertical (back wall) plane in what Hadid calls the “urban carpet.” Fiber optic slots in the sidewalk continue diagonally across the lobby floor; across the ceiling, bare fluorescent strips in coves run in the east-west direction. Light washing down the “urban carpet” wall from a skylight, and simple fluorescent channels in the stair volumes themselves, silhouette the staircase. This pattern of luminaires spaced far apart and then increasingly close together, whether it is in the lobby or gallery spaces, responds to the architectural dialogue of movement, multiple perspectives and interlocking spaces.”

 

DETAILS
Project: The Lois and Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, Ohio
Architect: Zaha Hadid Architects, London
Local Architect: KZF Design Inc., Cincinnati, Ohio
Lighting Consultant: Office for Visual Interaction (OVI), New York
Lighting Manufacturers: Belfer (non-public staircases); CJ Lighting (coves); Elliptipar (exterior cove lighting); ERCO Lighting USA (lobby and art galleries); Fiberstars (lobby in-floor lighting); and Neo-Ray Lighting (office lighting)

 

See more: https://www.architectmagazine.com/technology/lighting/the-rosenthal-center-for-contemporary-art_o

Full PDF: RosenthalCenterArchReviewJul03