Wellington Street Weave: UK

Wellington Street Weave is a public realm art project that was commissioned to transform the Wellington Street underpass in Luton, UK. Conceived by artist and designer Jack Wates, the project was developed through a series of workshops with young people in the area.

The design takes the form of a weave of colourful conduit that wraps the tunnel to support a range of bespoke Reggiani light ‘cells’. Gentle animation across these luminaires produces colourful shadows that shift from wall to wall, while minimising fluctuation in the overall light intensity of the tunnel.

The workshops for this project were engineered to allow participants to engage with a range of design methodologies throughout various stages of the project. They began with a session on site surveying the tunnel, and developed into a series of drawing exercises that explored potential conduit patterns and lighting configurations. This then fed into the creation of a large, scaled model, which was devised to be magnetic, to allow different schemes to be discussed and tested quickly as a group. The resulting design materialised as a sculptural weave of conduit, expressed as interlocking diagonals on the ceiling plane that become parallel vertical drops on the sidewalls.

The second set of workshops was centred on engaging participants with the practice of lighting design. By working with Reggiani’s versatile Cells light fitting, many different configurations of colours, reflectors and diffusers could be explored. Through the testing of different reflectors (circular, rectangular and asymmetric), comparisons could be made between the lit effect that each would produce, as well as the issue of glare when mounted at different positions on the wall. This led to a final configuration in which fittings with asymmetric beam distribution were used high up on the wall to light the soffit, while fittings with a rectangular beam distribution were placed low down, to light the opposite wall while minimising glare.

The participatory workshops also looked at light and colour. By affixing coloured gels to the front of each of the sixteen individual reflectors, the concept of colour mixing was explored. The aim was to produce white light in the space, while creating coloured shadows on the walls and ceiling. This was ultimately achieved by using balanced combinations of blue and amber in some fittings, and red, green and blue in others. As the tunnel fills up with people, the strength and saturation of the coloured shadows increases naturally due to more of the fixtures, which wash out the shadows, being blocked by people’s presence.

www.jackwates.com