The bare basics…
… are exactly what is needed sometimes. Even after a century of progress, travel often remains a taxing and stressful situation. Leaving home, switching modes of transportation and the dragging around of suitcases, chasing after rambunctious offspring… – even with the best off smartphone apps, things never run perfectly smoothly, are never perfectly coordinated. We would be hard pressed to find a better description of this character of airports, than in the Douglas Adams novel from the Dirk Gently series – “ The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul ”.
“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression “as pretty as an airport”. Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (…) and the architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs. They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve jangling colours, to make effortless the business of separating the traveller from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveller with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of the Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not.”
It was with this in mind, that Arcadia Lightwear approached designing the lighting for the new Fraport passenger terminal at the Ljubljana Airport. One of the key goals we had set for ourseves, was to create a light that was as calm as possible. To bring tranquility to this anthill of activities and intersecting routes, and to make the fixtures – the subject of Adams’ razor-sharp wit – as imperceptible as possible, as undisturbing as possible. Our purpose was – as always – to create comfort with light. Even in spaces that, by their very nature, are most inclined to be what the famous French anthropologist Marc Augé calls “non-places.” We hope we succeeded. And a happy journey …
Foto: Janez Marolt
