UK Pavilion wins darc award

BDP is delighted to have won a darc award for lighting the UK Pavilion, Milan Expo in the Best Landscape Scheme – High Budget category.  BDP’s architects, engineers, landscape and lighting designers worked with artist Wolfgang Buttress to create a beautifully integrated multi-sensorial Hive structure which has also been shortlisted for a Blueprint award and a World Interior News Award and features regularly in lighting magazines Mondo, Lighting, LJ, FX and AL.

The pavilion, which has had over two million visitors since it opened in May, uses sound and light mapped from a live stream of a real beehive in the UK. Accelerometers are used to measure the activity of the colony and algorithms are used to convert the bee colony vibrations into lighting effects.  One thousand individually-addressable LED luminaires allow the Hive to pulse and glow, acting as a visual representation of bee activity.

BDP’s lighting designers were also shortlisted in the Best Decorative Lighting Installation category for Meadowhall Shopping Centre and the team put together an installation for the awards ceremony, which was held at Testbed1/Doodle Bar in Battersea, London on 24 September.

The darc awards are unique in that the winners are chosen by lighting design practices and their designers using an online voting system, making them the only peer-to-peer lighting design awards in the world.