Shekou Sea World Culture and Arts Center—Moderate simplicity and unparallel beauty

(LIGHTING DESIGN AWARDS 2018 SHORTLISTED)

Investor: Merchants Real Estate (Shenzhen)             

Architectural/ Landscape/Interior Design：Maki and Associates

Lighting co-design: Maki and Associates, GD-Lighting Design, LIGHTDESIGN INC.

Technical Support：ERCO (Tokyo & Shanghai)

Location: Shekou, Shenzhen, China

Area of Structure：73918.08 ㎡

Complete Time:  2017.12

Photographer:  Eric Cheung、Shu He、Zhang Chao

The core of simplicity, I dream of it.

The spirit of purity, I keep seeking it.

The ultimate delicacy, I keep thinking of it.

The real beauty, I keep longing for it.

Happy research, I shall never give it up.

Top integrity, I live for it.

The Ode to Simplicity by Yue Ya Shan Ren seeks the path to purity and tranquility. Shekou Sea World Culture and Arts Center is just a shelter in town from complexity and into beauty. The building highlights openness and connectivity, so that people, space and nature can have quiet dialogues. The lighting coincides with them to hide among buildings and landscapes to give off soundless beauty.

GD (GD-LIGHTINGDESIGN) practices simplicity all through to have all the lighting hidden among spatial levels, interfaces and constructs, creating an effect of landscape changing with every step among mountains and waters. Except for part of the floor-lamps for guiding, the overall façade lighting emphasizes artistic conception instead of depiction and outlining, echoing with the architectural style of plainness and low profile. The three huge window-style shapes facing mountain, sea and city only have their bottoms lightly decorated by light to leave appropriate space for the artistic conception.

A large area of white wall and glasses fills in the space to maximize the natural light and the sense of transparency, and people’s sight will easily interact with surrounding landscapes at the sea and the green mountains. However, it’s a great challenge for the technical level of lighting, so that lighting design must give off top neatness by ultimate simplicity and accurate light matching and controlling technologies. Except for some parts to meet the flexible demand for exhibition in the future, all the lighting devices on the ceiling that can be abandoned have been wiped off to become the smallest possible number of down lights hidden in the groove. The public passageway and the transitional space also tries to avoid any visual interference by the highest level of restrained lighting to present the visual surprise and impact of the exhibits themselves.

The space façade has special materials and texture change imbedded, including glasses, red façade and black façade to create balanced yet interlaced rhythm and impression. The team of GD believes it’s part of the space, without deliberately stressing shaping but catering to lighting practices to create an effect of light and shadow by means of the textures of the light-reflecting materials. In order to meet up with the demand of temporary exhibition in a large-size space, we specially designed remote-control lamps and lanterns for the project to make point arrangement by accurate analog computation. As for details, the seemingly even and unified technique of illuminating line grooves in fact lights up space entrances to stress the guidance of the entrances.

Following humanized measure and the philosophy of being hidden in nature, Shekou Sea World Culture and Arts Center is presented to the world by an overall stance of harmonized order. The team of GD, by strict yet restrained lighting techniques, endows the culture landmark building with linear echoing inside and outside to acquire the biggest visual surprise by the ultimate restraint of lighting.