Tacheles Area Berlin

Commercial applications, shop lighting

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Hadler: Ms. Boissel, early in your career as a lighting designer, you already created custom luminaires. What does designing your own fixtures mean to you?

Anne Boissel: Yes, that’s true. In the first years of my career, I developed many custom luminaires, mainly for heritage-listed spaces. Working with custom luminaires is very different from standard fixtures: in custom design, you work much more in detail, often at a 1:1 scale. Every tiny detail has to fit the spatial conditions you find. You really have to engage with the existing structure. It’s time-consuming, but also extremely interesting. I simply enjoy developing project-specific custom luminaires.

Hadler: How did this custom luminaire project come about in the old Tacheles?

Anne Boissel: It started in 2019 with a standard lighting planning assignment. A temporary showroom for high-end residential properties was to be set up in the former theater hall of Tacheles in Berlin. I was asked to create a lighting concept, mainly using standard luminaires at the time. When we had to move to other rooms within the Tacheles area in 2021, we simply took the old fixtures with us. But we suddenly encountered a different ceiling situation: instead of a suspended ceiling, there were exposed ventilation pipes. I had to get creative to convert recessed luminaires into surface-mounted fixtures while accommodating accessories. In 2023, we moved again—again to rooms with raw ceilings and silver pipe casings. With each move, the number of custom luminaires grew.

Hadler: That sounds challenging. How did you approach the lighting concept in the 2nd and 3rd showrooms given the changing ceiling conditions?

Anne Boissel: Fundamentally, my clients always wanted a lighting concept that suited both their stage-like presentation concept and the unusual spaces. The former theater rooms in Tacheles had a roughness of their own, with peeling plaster on walls and ceilings—a kind of industrial look that strongly contrasted with the high-end apartments being marketed there. My idea was to emphasize this contrast with the luminaires, designing them in a deliberately rough manner.

Hadler: What did that mean concretely for the design of the custom luminaires?

Anne Boissel: The ceiling with all the pipes was a wonderful source of inspiration that helped me reinterpret the old fixtures into surface-mounted and pendant luminaires. My idea was to continue the silver pipe construction in the luminaires by using similar materials for the housings. So the shape was essentially determined by the accessories that had to be hidden. This also led to the hammered metal reflectors for the three Luxsystem custom luminaires.

Hadler: And what do these three Luxsystem custom luminaires look like exactly?

Anne Boissel: First, there’s the SL 20.3 in various light colors as a horizontal pendant, continuing the character of the ventilation pipes. Then there’s a sort of chandelier made of vertically mounted SL 20.3 luminaires with the same reflector, mounted back-to-back. The sheets don’t touch each other but always form a gap, creating a rhythm of light and shadow. The third custom luminaire consists of a black, wide frame with four SL 20.3 luminaires with folded back reflectors mounted on it. Between them are spotlights, which also received a rough housing. Altogether, very raw designs—a real bit of tinkering.

Hadler: Tinkering? That sounds very hands-on.

Anne Boissel: (lacht)(laughs) Exactly. It was literally guerrilla-style custom luminaire construction. We had a very limited budget for materials, and no workshop. Everything was assembled directly on-site. I had to design the housings simply. I had the reflectors made from hammered sheet metal by a semi-finished goods manufacturer—very roughly processed standard material, no welded corners, no pre-drilled holes for cable routing. On-site, we had two sawhorses with a board as a workbench and a team of untrained workers whom I told, “Please drill here.” Very unconventional. For the pendants, we used simple Reutlinger hangers.

Hadler: How did you find the process of designing custom luminaires from the SL 20.3?

Anne Boissel: It was quite easy to come up with something new for the SL 20.3. The light lines have a very minimal, unobtrusive design that leaves plenty of freedom to create something of your own—basically like a bare fluorescent tube, or raw material. That’s why both worked so well together.

Hadler: A wonderful way to reuse luminaires from a previous project.

Anne Boissel: Exactly—the direction we need to move in: more reuse. In architecture, there’s been a call for longer to work more with existing structures. Engaging with what you find in a project brings so much vitality into the design. Yes, it requires more planning effort, but it’s rewarded: with fun in designing and with unique luminaires. I was very happy to be able to focus on custom luminaire design again in this project. It really inspired me to continue designing in this direction.