14
MARCH 2020
LIGHTING JOURNAL
The Neuron Pod in London’s Whitechapel is an eye-catching 10m-high learning and community centre designed by the late architect Will Allsop. With a complex lighting scheme based around flexible fibre optic ‘dendrites’, getting things right required creativity, careful planning and doggedness, as Mark Sutton Vane recalls
By Mark Sutton Vane
F
or me, lighting schemes should tell a story. They should take the ideas a building wants to tell, or the design team wants to communicate, or the function that a building needs to emphasise and show how it works. The lighting designer takes those requirements, perhaps exaggerates them a bit, maybe emphasises them. But the key is they tell the ‘story’, sell the dream, make that emotional ‘thing’ happen, grab the heart – through light. Through what the eyes see, the heart can then feel; for me, great lighting design is all
about the emotions of the building. This was very much the case when I was asked to develop the lighting scheme for The Neuron Pod. The Neuron Pod is part of Queen Mary University’s Centre of the Cell science education centre in Whitechapel, east London. It is a 10m-high, 23m-long learning and community centre which opened in May last year and is connected to the Blizard Institute (part of Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry) via a bridge. It was designed by the late, great
architect Will Alsop, who I felt honoured to be able to work with, even though, tragically, he died during the construction of this project; so he never saw the finished building. But he was a delight to work with.
FIBRE OPTIC ‘DENDRITES’
A neuron has a long stem and then has ‘hairs’ which stick out, which are called dendrites. So that was the inspiration; that was Will’s idea. You are in a place that is all about learning about biology and cells, yet at the same time you are effectively learning inside a cell.
