Haw Par Villa Heritage Lighting by Stanley Tay Wee King Wins the A' Design Award in Lighting Products and Fixtures Design

The Work

Project

Haw Par Villa Heritage Lighting

Function

Heritage Lighting

Category

Lighting Products and Fixtures Design

Discipline

Industrial Design

Industry

Furniture & Home and Electronics & Appliances

Colors

Maroon, Black, Dark Red, Dark Goldenrod and Saddle Brown

Images

5

Client

Singapore Tourism Board

The Recognition

Laureate

Stanley Tay Wee King

Country

Singapore

Recognition

A' Design Award

Edition

2021 - 2022

Design ID

#126012

Credits

Team

Stanley Wee King Tay, Aries Lay Hoon Goh and Addison Yu Ann Goh

Image Credits

Illuminating Asia SG Pte Ltd

Design Details

Unique Properties

The design is a balancing act between staying true to the sculptures’ stories, while making them more accessible than before. The sculptures can only be enjoyed when visitors visit the park, so the first design intent was to use moving lights situated at the park’s entrance to draw visitors into the park. Once inside, visitors are then led naturally by the lighting to the most important sculptures. Each sculpture’s lighting is then handcrafted to showcase the stories to the greatest effect.

Inspiration

Built by the Tiger Balm family in the 1930s, Haw Par Villa is an oriental park containing sculptures and dioramas from the epic to the macabre. Over the years, visitorship fell steadily due to changing tastes. The brief was to breathe new life to these sculptures through lighting, and re-engage a new generation of visitors with its timeless folklores. We are honored to win the proposal competition to work with the Singapore Tourism Board (the park custodian) on this national commission.

Research

We did both cultural and technical research. Culturally, many of the dioramas are famous Chinese folklores, and we needed to dive deeper into these folklores in order to light them properly. In a battle scene of the Eight Immortals, we studied old books to know the 'order of battle', so key details would be lit. Technically, we used rapid prototyping to quickly cycle through variations for the best solution. We tested whenever we could, at our office, on-site, and using miniatures.

Challenge

This project is on a national heritage site, protected by conservation laws. Drilling and hacking are strictly prohibited. Many natural first-choice solutions cannot be used, and we had to constantly create new solutions from second-best options to get the desired lighting effect. A lot of our time was building structures that would give us total installation flexibility. And because each sculpture was unique, it was like 20 individual projects, with no economies of scale.

Realization and Technology

There are too many different kinds of lighting products used to individually mention. More importantly, all SKUs were customized at the factory to our exact specifications - length, luminosity, color temperature, throw of the light, and other details. In this way, most products are bespoke, even though the SKUs are readily available. The key product we used for the realization of the moving light show is the Gobo projector made by Martin Harmon, and we worked closely with them to enable a moving slide show. We also build a structure from scratch to house the Marting Harmon projector.

Operation and Interaction

The moving light show is situated right at the park's entrance, so that when passers-by experience the light show, they will develop curiosity about the contents inside the park. Warm white (2700-3000K light) is chosen so when visitors come into the park, it feels like a resort, increasing its comfort level. Lighting on the main dioramas are then hand-crafted for overall effect of drawing the visitors into the details.

Project Duration and Location

The project started in February 2020, and all installations finished in December 2020. However, the project was suspended from April - July of 2020 due to pandemic lockdown. The project is situated in the Republic of Singapore.

Specifications

The entire Haw Par Villa park is 8.5HA in area. We lighted up more than 20 individual sculpture attractions, the smallest of them about 10 sq metres in area, and the largest about 200 sq metres. The highest light structure we built was over 5 metres. Many kilometres of wiring and cabling was laid to enable power delivery to the new lights. It was a massive engineering undertaking.

Keywords

lightingdesign, lightingconsultant, heritagelighting, landscapelighting