Interview With Lighting Project Architects Anuj Gala and Jari Vuorinen

What is the main idea behind the lighting project of the Tallinn Old Town? How does it differ from the usual lighting? 

The Tallinn Old Town walls and towers have stood the test of time for centuries protecting the City and its inhabitants. Lighting Design Collective wanted the lighting concept to be a subtle tribute to the scars and fragments of history expressed by the walls. The lighting solution is based on showing details in a whispering way instead of floodlighting everything or creating a colorful „Disneyland“.

The approach is rather emotional than mathematical and its keywords are atmosphere and discovery. Some of the lit locations and details only reveal themselves over time when visited enough times.

Please describe your work process more closely. How did you get to the result? 

Our process was relatively simple in terms of coming up with the concept. The concept was worked out primarily on our first site visit when we got the idea to take a delicate approach.

Most time and effort went into designing the placement of the luminaires. As a UNESCO site, Tallinn Old Town places a limitation on the placement of fixtures which meant that some compromises had to be made in terms of optimal luminaire placement to achieve certain desired effects. Of course, all the installation works had to be designed to match the guidelines on preservation works for historical sites.

Besides, the amount of drawings and materials of Old Town were limited. Lighting Design Collective decided to take a slightly different approach to documentation by using drones and laser scanning to accurately map out the locations and luminaire placement. With an existing site, it was easy to do mock-ups and test lighting to define final specifications and positions. 

What kind of objects were the most interesting to work with? Which results were most satisfying? 

There were many interesting layers to work with but for us, the most interesting was to create an image as holistic as possible that allows visitors to experience the sites from both near and far. The intimate places where you can touch and sense the walls are the most satisfying. We feel that we have managed to create a sense of timelessness in some of those sites.

If you could only bring out one detail which makes your eyes light up the most, what would this be? 

Jari: To me it would be the Pikk Jalg site. It has a distinct quality to itself that has only become evident through lighting. Previously the wall fragments at that site were left in complete darkness.
Anuj: Patkuli Stairs would be the one. Previously, you could just see bright blobs of light with no views to the wall. This has now been changed for calmer and warmer lighting revealing the hidden shapes and forms. 

The person who does lighting bears a lot of responsibility. If you light something up then it casts a shadow on something else. In other words, you get to choose what the viewer will notice and what he will not. The Tallinn Old Town has a long history and the objects with lots on nuances give plenty options for this. How did you make your choices and was it easy? 

Lighting has got a great power. It can reveal things or hide them. For some sites, the choices seemed easy while for others it was a long process to understand what “deserves” to be lit. All in all, it was a relatively intuitive process from our design team where decisions were made in a good collaboration.

Warm and thoroughly planned lighting brings the Old Town to life and makes it tell its stories. How did the Tallinn Old Town come through to you during your work and what stories did it tell you? 

We have come to fall in love with the Old Town. As a lighting designer, you need to challenge yourself to use „vampire eye“ to find the essentials (ref. The Vampire Lestat, where the protagonist comes to see things differently after becoming a vampire). Not everything needs to be lit and darkness is not always a threat. 

To us, the main stories whispered by the walls contain elements of time and history. Our small lighting interventions are only a small fragment of their long history. The light will fade out but the walls will remain. Protecting, embracing, remembering.