Daylighting is one key to keeping our mental states balanced when we’re indoors, but sometimes it’s impossible to bring sunlight into interior places. Luckily, one innovative designer is experimenting with LED lights to create fake sunlight reflections on interior walls. Using over 3,000 LED lights, which give off the natural color of sunlight, Daniel Rybakken is designing lighting fixtures in the shapes of parallelograms, which give the impression of sunlight coming in through a window and reflecting off a surface. This light trickery, although totally artificial, might be just the thing to bring outdoor cheer into a gloomy indoor space.
Rybakken had been working on projects that involve daylighting and wanting to test them out in an architectural setting, he took over an entrance to a building in Stockholm and completely retrofitted it. The entrance and stairwell had no natural sunlight whatsoever and Rybakken’s hope was to “replicate the positive sensation of daylight.” Walls were painted white and the staircase core was retroffited with Rybakken’s parallelogram-shaped LED light fixtures mounted flush into the walls, with a total of over energy efficient 6,000 LED bulbs.
The results are astounding. Before, the entrance was a dark, dank, scary sort of place, and afterwards, with the white walls and reflecting light on the stairwell, you’d think they had added windows and a skylight. This light shift makes a huge difference on the psyche and even though all you see is a distorted rectangle light reflection, it looks exactly the way actual sunlight would reflect in through a window on a wall. Granted Rybakken used over 6,000 bulbs which certainly adds up in the energy department, it’s still fascinating work.
photo credits: ©Daniel Rybakken