How can daylight and modern lighting technology find harmony in historical buildings? What are the limits of illumination in the context of art? Answers can be found in the newly revamped National Museum Stockholm.
Friedrich August Stüler designed the building in 1866 to be a museum flooded with natural light. As part of the renovation, Wingårdhs Architects and Kardorff Ingenieure Lichtplanung set out to rekindle this potential. “The special thing about a naturally lit museum is not just the light,” says Gabriele von Kardorff, Managing Director of Kardorff Ingenieure. “It is also the revelation of the view of the historic environment while one is in a room with the treasures of the land.”
Natural light now enters some of the exhibition rooms through windows and glass roofs. Depending on the time of day or the season, the changing light conditions outside influence the visitor’s experience of the museum. The primary purpose of art lighting is always to illuminate objects in a way that defines their contours.
Visitors move through the sculpture courtyard as if under an open sky. Wingårdhs designed a spectacular glass roof, creating an atrium as an exhibition space. But how can this daylight-flooded, exceptionally high atrium be optimally illuminated?
Kardorff Ingenieure collaborated with XAL experts to develop special luminaires featuring flexible spotlights and interchangeable optics, enabling illumination of the atrium from a height of nearly eleven meters. The luminaires were powder-coated in a custom color so that their geometry and finish harmonize with the surrounding architecture.
The minimalist installation keeps interventions on the historic walls to an absolute minimum. The result is a mythical atmosphere that does not compromise the advantages of modern lighting technology.
Gabriele von Kardorff and her husband Volker von Kardorff run the Berlin-based lighting design office, which they founded in 1997. Their connection to Friedrich August Stüler goes back to the reconstruction of the Neues Museum in Berlin.
Their greatest source of inspiration? “Consciously observing things.”
The most beautiful lighting atmosphere they have ever experienced was in the Stockholm archipelago, as the sun set between the thousands of small islands.
