4 minute read
Up Close With Martin Klaasen
2024 marks my 45th year in the lighting industry and what a ride it’s been. As a graduate in Delft in the Netherlands with a Masters degree in Industrial Design, I didn’t even know that lighting design existed as a profession. But I was offered a position at Philips’ Lighting Design and Engineering Centre in Eindhoven, went to see the department and what I saw attracted me immediately. I said yes on the spot and never looked back.
I got to work with – and learn from – a team of around 50 lighting experts in all different applications doing projects and innovation research all over the world. Not just any lighting projects, but lighting impact studies, big city redevelopments, Olympic Games, light and sounds shows, hotels and monuments, nothing was off the table. That is where I developed my own lighting design style. Picking appealing solutions from the best of the best as I quickly learned that there is no one solution to a lighting challenge!
Today, that is still reflected in my design approach. I don’t really want to see the light sources, unless it is a deliberate decorative element in space. It’s all about validating the space or the architecture with light. Over the years social responsibility integrated itself into my designs as well, with a focus on sustainability, light pollution, maintainability, affordability and circularity.
Philips posted me to Singapore in the 1980s to set up their project activities in Asia Pacific as until then all their projects were handled from Eindhoven. Their sales force there only knew how to sell from a catalogue rather sell a mood, an ambience and an effect, with all the user benefits that come with it, so I trained them to become more project savvy and application-oriented.
I had already travelled extensively in Europe, but once I was in Singapore the real travelling began. I was in a plane every week travelling from Korea in the north to Australia and New Zealand in the south to train and support the new generation of lighting designers.
In that period, we build eight lighting application centres in various capital cities in the region, all to demonstrate lighting effects rather than products.
It was a great cultural learning experience, one that has also created lasting friendships. Many employees that I trained went on to become successful lighting designers and businessmen in their own right.
This was also the time that I started to realise that there were actually professional lighting designers earning their living with it. So I decided to jump into the deep and to start my own practice in Singapore in 1991. I got lucky and landed one of the most coveted projects in the world, The KLCC Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, one that brought me instant recognition. Life was looking good!
Not surprisingly I was totally unprepared for the financial crash in 1997; most of my projects got halted and I stared bankruptcy in the face. But I survived, moved to Perth, Australia and rebuild Klaasen Lighting Design to the business it is today.
One big theme has always run through my career and that’s education. I love to share my knowledge, create more awareness, mentor the new generation and educate the general public of the benefits of better lighting.
This is expressed through my other ventures: Lighting Design of Things, which embraces the intelligent world we’re entering; the Virtual Lighting Design Community, an online knowledge-sharing platform; and more recently, my very own Light Talk site, which brings together all my knowledge, my books, vlogs, blogs, services and classes.
