Natural lighting system is brightening Japan

BY KAZUMI TAKO STAFF WRITER

2011/10/04

The dining room of Shoji Moriguchi's home in Otsu, Shiga Prefecture. Family members say that they don't need to turn on the lights during the day because the Skylighttube keeps the room bright enough. (Kazumi Tako)Noboru Inoue, president of Inosyo Co., shows the material he developed to install the Skylighttube in roofs. "Preventing a leak is the most important part of the work," he said. (Kazumi Tako)

OTSU -- When Shoji Moriguchi had the Skylighttube installed in the ceiling of his home in Otsu, Shiga Prefecture, in 2004, it was like turning night into day.

Previously, his dining room, which faces north, would be dark all day and a family member wanting to read the newspaper would have to switch on the lights. Now, the Skylighttube collects light in a dome on the roof and spreads it evenly into the room.

"Even on a rainy day, the room is brighter with the Skylighttube than with bulbs," said Moriguchi, 53, a company employee. "We were not required to do maintenance for the past seven years."

The use of the power-saving Skylighttube, introduced by Inosyo, a firm in Otsu, is spreading gradually among households and company factories.

Inosyo has installed 2,500 units for homes and 700 units for factories, and posted 100 million yen ($1.3 million) in sales for the year ending in August.

"The market for the Skylighttube will grow to 10 billion yen in 10 years," said Noboru Inoue, 59, president of Inosyo. "I would like to build a society that uses zero energy."

Inoue said interest in the Skylighttube surged out of concern over possible power shortages in the wake of the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami.

The number of inquiries about the equipment shot up to more than 60 a month after the disaster, many of them businesses, compared with about 20 before the disaster.

An official with FamilyMart Co., a convenience store operator, said that customers viewed the equipment installed in some of its stores in Tokyo positively.

The Skylighttube works by gathering light in a dome placed on the roof of a home. The light passes through an aluminum tube that extends into the room. The brightness of light collected in the dome remains the same inside the tube as the light is reflected.

The Skylighttube can also spread light evenly with a special cover, compared with a skylight, whose illumination level varies depending on the time of day.

Another advantage of the Skylighttube is that it can eliminate more than 97 percent of ultraviolet rays. Thus, tatami mats and furniture are protected from darkening over the years from the accumulated effects of the rays.

It also helps keeps heat out of the home or building, preventing the room temperature from rising.

Inosyo, which has 12 employees, began offering the equipment for households in 2004 and the larger version aimed for businesses in 2007.

The Skylighttube is estimated to save 7,000 yen to 10,000 yen per unit a year on electricity costs.

Installation charges are about 250,000 yen for one that can illuminate an eight-tatami-mat room, but it requires no maintenance costs afterward, the company said.

Cosmetic giant Shiseido Co. introduced 82 units for areas measuring 4,200 square meters in the storage area of its factory in Kuki, Saitama Prefecture, in May last year.

A company official said that the light coming from the 7-meter-high ceiling is as bright as the mercury lamps that it has replaced.

With the introduction of the equipment, the company is saving 90,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year and cutting back on 34.5 tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

Shiseido first learned of the innovative lighting system at a lighting exhibition in Tokyo.

The company is considering the use of the equipment in other factories, saying that it has proved "more effective than expected."

Apart from Shiseido, a large undergarment firm has adopted the Skylighttube for the office section of its factory.

Inoue hit upon the idea for the Skylighttube in the mid-1990s after a client complained about the lack of brightness in his house even on a sunny day.

But he had a difficult time finding material to reflect sunlight efficiently and transmit it into a room.

When he was about to abandon the idea, he came across Solatube Australia, a company dealing in natural lighting system products, through an acquaintance.

He obtained the domes designed to gather light and aluminum tubes after Inosyo signed a deal with the Australian company in 2003.

But Japanese homes, many of which are roofed with ovalized tiles, posed a challenge for installation without being prone to leaking.

Inosyo finally came up with special components for the equipment to be affixed tightly after working on more than 100 types of material.

Two years after the launch of the product in the Kansai region, Inosyo received an order from an individual in Iwate Prefecture, in the Tohoku region.

It could have paved the way for the company to expand its market, but Inosyo had at that time limited staff for sales promotion.

So the company decided to provide contractors in the region with a training session to teach them how to install its equipment.

Now, more than 370 companies across the nation, most of them construction companies, are offering the Skylighttube for households.

Steven Holl

官方網站
http://www.stevenholl.com/


霍爾：羅耀拉紀念教堂 收入: 《人與空間的對話：漢寶德看建築》

Steven Holl
(1947– )

American architect. The Japanese architect, Ito, has referred to Holl's buildings as ‘more aural than visual’, and Holl himself compared his Stretto House, Dallas, TX (1989–92), with Béla Bartók's (1881–1945) Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936), for the musical term stretto, which suggests overlapping of response to subject, as in fugal writing, has its parallels in the overlapping of spaces within the building. In addition, the proportions of the house are determined by the golden section. Other works by Holl include a severe 28-apartment structure as part of the Nexus World project at Fukuoka, Kyushu, Japan (1989–91), the D. E. Shaw & Co. Office, NYC (1991–2), and the Storefront for Art and Architecture, Kenmare Street, SoHo, NYC (1994), in which large parts of the façade swivel.

Bibliography

• Jodidio (1993, 1996)

Architecture Review

Civic Engagement Trumps ‘Shhh!’

Steven Holl Architects

Queens Library at Hunters Point: A model of this new branch, designed by Steven Holl and Chris McVoy.

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

Published: January 30, 2011

There may be no better example of the worrying state of American architecture than the career of Steven Holl.

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Steven Holl Architects

A rendering of the Hunters Point library in Queens as seen from East 42nd Street in Manhattan.

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Steven Holl Architects

A rendering of the library’s lobby.

At 63, this New York architect is widely considered one of the most original talents of his era. His work has influenced a generation of architects and students. And over the last decade or so he has become a star in faraway places like Scandinavia and China, where he is celebrated as someone able to imbue even the most colossal urban projects with lyricism.

Yet his career at home has been negligible. He has had only a handful of notable commissions in the United States, and his output in New York is embarrassingly slight: a modest addition to Pratt Institute’s school of architecture, a cramped (if underrated) gallery at the edge of Little Italy and a handful of interior renovations.

So when the Queens Library Board of Trustees approved the design of the new Hunters Point community library this month, it was a well-deserved and long overdue breakthrough. The project, done in collaboration with Mr. Holl’s partner Chris McVoy and scheduled to begin construction early next year, will stand on a prominent waterfront site just across the East River from the United Nations. It is a striking expression of the continuing effort to shake the dust off of the city’s aging libraries and recast them as lively communal hubs, and should go far in bolstering the civic image of Queens.

The building’s beguiling appearance — with giant free-form windows carved out of an 80-foot-tall rectangular facade of rough aluminum — should make it an instantly recognizable landmark. Seen from Manhattan, it will have a haunting presence on the waterfront, flanked by the red neon Pepsi-Cola sign to the north and the remnants of an abandoned ferry terminal to the south. At dusk the library’s odd-shaped windows will emit an eerie glow, looking a bit like ghosts trapped inside a machine. And late at night, when the building is dark, spotlights will illuminate its pockmarked facade and the windows will resemble caves dug into the wall of a cliff.

Only at the site itself, however, will the optimism driving Mr. Holl’s design come into focus. The library will stand at the western edge of Queens West, a soulless mix of generic apartment towers and barren streets built up in the last decade or so that has neither the dilapidated charm of the old manufacturing neighborhoods to the east nor the density of a real urban neighborhood. (The development’s one saving grace is a narrow park that snakes along the riverfront; its steel gantries, once used for loading boats, are an ode to the area’s industrial past.)

Mr. Holl ’s design is not about escaping this world but transforming it into something more poetic. Approaching from the towers across the street, visitors will enter a tranquil reading garden, a little paradise walled off from the gloomy scene that surrounds it. Ginkgo trees will shade the garden, partly blocking the view of the towers. As visitors move closer to the library, they will be able to see through the lobby windows and out over a reflecting pool and the riverfront park. Other odd-shaped windows will allow diagonal glimpses up through the building and out to the sky.

When I first saw a rendering of this facade it brought to mind Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1975 “Day’s End,” in which Matta-Clark used a power saw to carve big circular openings into the exterior of an abandoned industrial building on the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan. In both works the overscaled cut-out openings are powerfully metaphorical. They suggest the desire to expose private, interior worlds to public scrutiny, and — by seeming to undermine the buildings’ structural stability — they evoke an unstable, ever-changing world.

But Mr. Holl’s design is also a statement about the individual’s place in a larger communal framework. The lobby is a towering space framed on both sides by several big, balconylike reading rooms. To get to them visitors climb a staircase that runs up the lobby’s back wall and past one of the huge free-form windows that afford views of the East River and Manhattan. The stairs lead first to the main reading room, which overlooks the lobby, then cross back to a children’s area or continue up to another reading room for teenagers. Eventually they emerge onto a rooftop terrace, where during nice weather people will be able to attend lectures and performances, or , when nothing is going on, lounge around and enjoy the spectacular view.

The strength of this layout is that it allows Mr. Holl to balance the reader’s need for solitude with a strong sense of community. The main reading room, cantilevering out over the lobby, is the most open. The children’s reading room, the noisiest, is enclosed behind a curved wall with a few small windows cut into it so that kids can look across to the adults or up to the teenagers.

But it is the constant reminders of the larger world provided by the giant cuts through the building’s surface that give the design so much resonance. Mr. Holl is not interested in creating a monastic sanctuary; he wants to build a monument to civic engagement. The views aren’t just pretty; they remind us that the intellectual exchange of a library is part of a bigger collective enterprise. It’s a lovely idea, and touching in its old-fashioned optimism.

A version of this review appeared in print on January 31, 2011, on page C1 of the New York edition.