The architects Schmidhuber & Partner took part at the latest IFA trade fair in Berlin with an extraordinary stand. They showed just how innovative a fair stand can be. Their 3,700 m2 (approx.) creation received an ADC (Art Directors Club Deutschland) Silberner Nagel award in the “Communication Space” category. The same stand also received the International Advertising Competition Golden Award of Montreux 2010 and the Gold Award for Exhibition Design in New York. The lighting designer Martin Kuhn used two full-size grandMAs to run the lights.
The outstanding characteristic of the stand was the use of about 8,000 LED screens and 11 Clay Paky Alpha Spot HPE 1200s, together with various other lights. Kuhn said he used the Alpha Spots “for their versatility, their truly original gobos, and the creative possibilities they offer.”
Kuhn explained the lighting design: “A strong no-dazzle light dominated the stand with high quality colour reproduction on the exhibited products. There was also a rotating horizon, illuminated with 420 m LED ceiling lamps and blue fluorescent tubes. This gave rise to a white and blue based environment, which was perfect for the coloured images displayed on the hundreds of screens. Whiteness indices of between 2,800 K and 4,500 K were required throughout the stand. The light had to be warm along the paths followed by the visitors, and colder on the monitors.”
“Instead, inside the ‘structure’, the colourful worlds of the videos had to be supported with suitable colours and movements. The Alpha Spot HPE 1200s, which shone through openings in the mirror ceiling, mainly served this purpose. The six video columns turned out to be highly demanding: they were supported by several hundred cues in the corresponding lighting effects timecode. The rest of the stand was illuminated statically.”
Björn Hermann was the lighting operator and Schmidhuber & Partner the architects. Technical management was dealt with internally by Production Office, while the equipment was supplied by Pool.
Foto: Copyright – die photodesigner