ICE IS ‘SNICE’

ICE IS ‘SNICE’

Sweden’s astonishing IceHotel in the village of Jukkasjärvi is not just an amazing space to visit. The fact it is rebuilt every year makes it a vibrant crucible for ice artists – but also an ongoing challenge for lighting designers

By Emilio Hernandez

Sweden’s ‘IceHotel’ in the village of Jukkasjärvi is an amazing venue, in an incredible location. First handsculpted in 1989 out of three massive ice blocks, it is now very much a must-visit Swedish landmark for travellers from all parts of the globe.

But when you consider going to visit it, as I was fortunately able to do last year, suddenly questions spring to mind about what this space actually involves, not least in terms of lighting such a vibrant, luminous but also challenging space.

Of course, you can read all about the IceHotel online, and many practical questions about it are answered through a Wikipedia search or dozens of the YouTube videos associated with it or, indeed, its own website [1]

But, as a lighting designer, the questions we have are not well catered for. So, we took the leisurely 600km train ride north from Umea (which is already 600km north of Stockholm) to Jukkasjärvi to find out. The venue sits immediately adjacent to the glacial Torne River, containing some of the purest and most delicious water the world has to offer (yes, delicious water).

To give some context, the hotel is split into three camps. There are a number of traditional wooden cabins, as the river is popular with rafting in the summer months. Then there’s the ‘365 Hotel’, a permanent structure housing the Ice Bar and a dozen or so ‘permanent’ rooms, which opened in 2016.

In fact, such is the prominence of the venue, that one of the suites has been designed by Sweden’s Prince Carl Philip Bernadotte, who is himself a graphic designer and co-founder of design house Bernadotte & Kylberg.

Last but not least for the purists, there’s the IceHotel itself. For more than 30 years this has been built and rebuilt and everything is made from either ice, snow or ‘snice’ (a more consistent and reliable compacted snow ice mixture used to form the main structure) extracted from the crystal clear and very frozen Torne River.

As an architect or an engineer, you could quietly obsess over the choice of parabolic arches and wall thicknesses, ice column spacings or the easily workable, gravity-defying qualities of ‘snice’. But, as lighting designers, we had our own questions about, simply, how do you light such a structure?

At this stage I need to point out that, when we visited, the IceHotel itself was not yet formally open for the season; we had taken a 600km punt on arriving, calling a friend of a friend and asking for a bit of a behind-the-scenes tour to see how you design a lighting scheme for an ice hotel. And they did not disappoint.

Within 30 minutes of checking in, there was a knock at the door and the hotel’s lighting designer John Petterson arrives with hard hats and high-vis jackets, as if this whole idea had been planned for months!

Upon entering the main hall through the reindeer skin-clad doors, we’re immediately struck by the generous height of the vaults and the precision of the structure. But our host quickly points out that the precision can be short-lived within the rooms themselves.

Guest artists, including yacht designers and lighting designers alike, have previously fallen foul of these expectations of structural tolerances with their laser measurers and their intricate lighting details.

The IceHotel is a moveable feast. ‘The rooms can move or sink up to half a metre during the season due to the heat generated from the occupants,’ says John. If you’re a structural engineer and planning on visiting, you’d best ignore that bit!

Corridors and ‘moulds’ are used to shape the ice and snow structures. John invites us to the lighting command centre, a fantastically quaint wooden hut 150m from the hotel itself.

It’s a site hut-come workshop, which has clearly evolved over the 30 years for this specific function.

Lighting designer John Petterson leads Anna Sandgren, co-founder of Ström, through the site

The infamous Testmaster 7000000. This test bench is where fixtures are visually calibrated against master light sources, as the extreme cold can affect some LED chips’ colour consistency over time over time. Below: Dutch artists Edith and Wilfred take time out of their hectic schedule to talk us through their process. Note the sharpie marks on the walls where they plan to carve channels

I’m looking around at dozens of shelves teeming with electronic inventory, looms of wire, chainsaws and even a countdown clock to opening day, whilst I rattle off my list of questions.

Me: ‘Why don’t you use fibre optics?’

John: ‘We do occasionally but they tend to crack and don’t bend so well at -25Celsius.’

Me: ‘What happens to the LEDs afterwards?’

John: ‘We recover 99%, but some can’t be retrieved.’

Me: ‘Are they reused each year?’

John: ‘The cold has quite an impact on theirCCT,sotheyarere-binned.’

Me: ‘Through a spectrometer?’

John: ‘No, through visual inspection against a master light source.’ (See the ‘TESTMASTER7000000’).

Me: ‘How do you run cables and power to light sources?’

John: ‘With the Snice, you can literally walkontheroofanddrillaholeforadownlight in two minutes. If something doesn’t work,wecanpatchitupwithsnoworcreate aledgetohideormountalightsource.’

Me: ‘What’s the biggest challenge?’

John: ‘With99%reflectivityonallsurfaces thechallengeisactuallygettingsufficiently low light levels. The Osram 3 x 0.3W LED puck has two of the LEDs covered and the thirdonehasseverallayersofneutraldensityfilmandabluefilter.’

Me: ‘Do you use controls/ dynamic lighting?’

John: ‘The ice doesn’t respond as well to saturatedRGBcolourastosubtlelayersof filters.Controlsystemsaresometimesused buttheamountoflightbeingusedisalready solowthatitsincrediblyhardtodimorcreate scenes. Typically, the artists want one scenetocomplementtheirwork.’

I’m briefly distracted as dozens of dogs pull sleds along the river just outside one of the windows.

We’re then invited to join a mock-up with two Dutch artists Edith & Wilfred on their installation of a ‘chicken coop’-themed room.

Designs are adapting in real time, mockups with light filters and different light sources affect decisions on where to draw the eye. They also use subtle counterpoints of warm and cool light to avoid saturation of the cones from one colour.

Whether or not to adorn a wall with intricate time-consuming details is influenced by the direction and type of lighting that could be used.

Wilfred’s made two ‘practice’ chickens, one from snice, the other from crystal-clear ice. These are tested in situ before he decides on which material to proceed with working up based on the lit effect.

Another installation that catches our eye is ‘Art Suite UV’ by a French partnership between artist Nicholas Triboulot and industrial designer Fernand Manzi.

They are the first to use UV light in the hotel’s history. Nicholas and Fernand use a black light (emitting UVA and small amounts of visible violet light at the very fringe of the visible light spectrum) to model their installations form.

They explain their fascination with UV’s properties, allowing the viewer to see beyond, deep into the beautiful sawtooth arrangement of pure ice cubes where there are still some tiny phosphor particles that emit light in response to excitement from the UVA wavelengths.

Nicholas admits that using violet light was a brave choice. As he explains: ‘It can be unflattering to the occupants as well as highlighting any… hygiene issues.’

Lighting design comes to the rescue here, with delicately placed white light focused softly on to the ice bed and two LEDs positioned within the cubes that form the base of the bed to emit a gentle night light at floor level.

It was also a brave choice in terms of the success of the installation’s overall concept. As mentioned by John earlier, the ice and snice respond less well to saturated colour.

This is due to the properties of water, where larger wavelengths of light are absorbed by its structure, leaving shorter wavelengths such as blue (and violet) able to be reflected.

It’s perhaps worth noting that this is different to the reason that the sky appears blue, which is due to the Rayleigh scattering effect of large wavelengths of light by tiny particles in the atmosphere.

The process of working the ice is fascinating. Artists are all provided with a vaulted room of equal size which is a (literally) blank canvas.

They work methodically from the top of the arched rooms down to the floor to enable them to gradually remove their scaffold towers. They use sharpies to mark out patterns and setting out; they have often customised their own carving tools to help with spacing or repetition, or the smoothing and detailing that working with ice and snice can require, while of course wearing thick gloves.

The concept of time is easily lost in a windowless room in a region in almost permanent darkness – and we’ve been with them an hour already.

We visit a couple of other artists, all of whom are hugely accommodating of our interruption (see links opposite) and appear to think it’s more than understandable that we would make such a trip just to see ‘work in progress’.

We’re struck by the sense of community. This is a real team. There are no drawings, there is limited time and it’s an incredibly harsh environment inside and out.

It takes hard work, collaboration and experience to create these uniquely beautiful spaces. But, as was mentioned (on more than one occasion), also trust between the artist and lighting designer to share their vision is key. Light becomes such a critical and tangible element when working with the unique medium or snow and ice.

Most people we spoke with had completed between ten and 15 seasons at the IceHotel. This is intimidating perhaps for anyone hoping to get involved, yet also testament to the sense of community and enjoyable, collaborative work atmosphere that has been built and cemented over time despite the seasonal nature of the work.

We’d love the opportunity to get involved in future seasons. So we’re putting it out there and we’ll see what happens!

Emilio Hernandez is lighting designer and co-founder of lighting design practice Ström, based in Umeå in Sweden

[1] ‘Ice hotels’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_hotel, IceHotel Sweden, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ice+hotel+sweden, The IceHotel https://www.icehotel.com/art-design-room-service

WITH THANKS

Our visit would have been nothing without the generosity and hospitality of the following artists working on the IceHotel at the time, with links included so you can see their finished works.

Edith and Wilfred: https://www.icehotel.com/art-design-bed-chickens

Tjasa and Ulrika: https://www.icehotel.com/art-design-room-service

Nicolas and Fernand: https://www.icehotel.com/art-design-uv

Marjolein and Maurizio: https://www. icehotel.com/art-design-air

Lighting HQ. This is a warm workshop where fixtures are made, repaired and calibrated for use on site

The Ceremony Hall Hikari at the IceHotel. This was created by artists Natsuko Saito and Shingo Saito. Photograph by Asaf Kilger, copyright the IceHotel

Here the contractor for the main entrance hall is on the roof drilling a hole to place LED nodes within the top of each column. The lighting designer then guides them via radio from within the structure. The ice columns are internally illuminated from above

In this image, work is underway in rooms off of the secondary corridors. These are lit using borrowed light, such is the internal reflectance