Crazy House

The architect and owner of the Crazy house called us to imagine a permanent art lighting installation that would make the night as crazy as her creation, and also to extend the opening hours after 6 PM, the nightfall in Vietnam. The site is an interlaced of homage to nature and of fairy architectures, designed as giant creatures emerging from the landscape. So it was obvious for us that we had to elongate this storytelling approach with a cinematographic concept of the lighting. We started imaging a storyboard of the visitor's path with a selection of references, from the fantastic and horror cinema, in which the light give us all the dramatic and magical effects that we intended to translate in the project. Similar to a movie scenario, we sequenced the park in several scenes where the lighting offers various ambiance and emotions, with a dynamic programming, that allow us to suddenly immerse the park in an unique atmosphere with a highly dramatic effect. In order to keep the magic of the night but also to not impact the day view of the park, the challenge was also to hide the installation. We solved this constraint by gathering the maximum of luminaires with only two masts, located very carefully to reach all our targets with RGB LED flood lights and gobo projectors. The rest of the luminaires have been adapted and integrated in the architecture and landscape almost unit by unit, with an intense period of moke-up and tests on site. We experimented the integration of LED strip light in concrete mesh tubes to illuminate the 180 m of stairs, of fiber optics in concrete rocks ceilings, of flood lights U.V. in real trees and of the bulky gobo projectors in a decorative fake tree. The client told us that she was really satisfied to have finally found a lighting designer that can deeply be involved and understand the specificity of her wishes, far from the standard lighting solutions that she has been tested in the past.