This story was originally published in Architectural Lighting.
Held every two years since 2002, Luminale is a light festival that takes place during Light+Building (March 18 to 23) in Frankfurt, Germany, featuring indoor and outdoor light art and urban design installations. This year, Luminale 2018 debuted a new concept dividing 149 projects into five categories: art, solutions, study, community, and better city. (Twenty-six of these installations were located in the nearby city of Offenbach, which has participated with an extension of Luminale since 2008.) Despite cold temperatures, organizers report that approximately 240,000 visitors attended the festival.
Courtesy Katharine Keane
Students from the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences wrapped columns of a 13th-century monastery-turned-museum in blue LED strips for their “Light Without End” installation.
“We intend Luminale to set long-term incentives for sustainable urban design,” festival director Isa Rekkab said in a press release. “We are glad that our new concept has been so popular and has already manifested itself in some projects. In all, the topics were very well received by the visitors.”
For the first time in the event’s history, Luminale organized two specific routes called Light Walks to see 35 of the installations. These routes featured festival highlights such as the light show at the Römer by Philip Geist; an OLED installation on the opera house by Nikolaus Hirsch, Michel Müller, and Rirkrit Tiravanija; the Urban Climate Canopy created by Technical University of Munich students on the Zeil; and the analog projection inside St. Catherine’s church. (See a map of the Light Walks here.)
Frankfurt will retain the two projects—the illlumination of the neighborhood surrounding the Bügel neighborhood and the redesigned lighting of the Friedberger Warte building by Christian Uitz—developed for the better cities category in an effort to improve the lighting scheme of the two areas.
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