Osram’s high-grade R&D centre at Treviso which designs LED, LMS (Light Management System) and electronic power luminaires, has recently expanded into its new Osram Light Studio, displaying electronic and opto-electronic technology as applied to lighting.
The display area designed by Andrea Cerquiglini includes a showroom and a bistrot zone. Both of these specifically set out to create a space where light and architecture blend together in complete osmosis, light being the main construction material. From this principle it was logical to choose white throughout as a base upon which to play a dynamic range of lighting effects. The two rooms have soft curving surfaces across which the light seems to melt and flow.
Each part has its own lighting system: ceiling “bubbles” in the business room, wall-mounted tube-lighting in the relaxation area. The round bubble shapes in the meeting-room light up in many colours and vary the atmosphere as the need dictates. The larger central bubble is lit by fluorescent technology alone, while all the others have mainly LEDs inside them shedding a halo of perimeter light which makes the bubbles appear to float free of the ceiling. The under-surface of all the LED bubbles is dome-shaped, lit from behind by a ring of LEDs hidden just out of sight around the lower circumference. The effect is of an irradiating plane, whereas the bubble is actually empty, hollow, immaterial. The walls of the club area are a mass of tube-lighting, 50 in all, forming a landscape of artificial nature, in which the light is graded from a soft white to all manner of colour shades. Thirty of the tubes are of irradiating opaline polycarbonate and twenty are white-painted metal. The polycarbonate tubes hold a strip of LEDs, divided lengthwise into three units which can be used separately or in exciting combinations, including all different colours. The metal tubes divide into two groups. Twelve have a strip of white LEDs fastened on the side towards the wall behind. The other eight have lengthwise slit openings through which linear fluorescent lamps again shine onto the back wall and bathe the room in indirect light.
OsramViale dell’Innovazione, 3
I - 20126 Milano
Tel. +39 02 4249.1
Fax +39 02 4249.380
www.osram.it
