Exploring sustainable, temporary lighting design
Tyvek Lighting Installation for a retail hub in Toronto
STACKLAB’s Tyvek lighting design was created for a beer hall in stackt market, a community-focused retail hub in Toronto’s city center. The unique market is distinctly industrial, made of over one hundred shipping containers, and will be at the site only temporarily with dismantling stated for 2021. STACKLAB embraced the temporary nature of the place and decided to use only widely available, recyclable, or reusable materials for the design intervention affirming the sustainability of their design, despite its ephemeral nature.
STACKLAB’s design approach addressed several important project parameters, most notably a limited construction timeline and a limited overall project life-span. Three simple tenets defined their approach:
- use materials that can be re-deployed in a purposeful way after the project concludes,
- elevate inexpensive, readily available construction materials through design and
- design a simple system that can be easily implemented by general trades.
STACKLAB selected high-density polyethylene Tyvek house wrap as the base material for their installation because it met the above-noted criteria but also because it has innate light diffusing qualities and comes in off-the-shelf roll sizes that offer a productive cutting yield for this scale of the installation.
The design elevates inexpensive, readily available, and re-usable, construction materials. Made of OSB strips from which hang folded Tyvek house wrap that holds custom LED fixtures, it lowers the perceived ceiling height and contributes to making it more intimate and conducive to people having conversations around the communal tables and movable furniture. At the same time, the vegetation, chosen for its suitability in a low-light environment, covering the top of the shipping containers and lining the walls softens the hard edges of the space. As a result, the industrial feel of the superstructure vanishes and transforms the space into something more closely fitting what one would expect from a beer hall, drawing people inside into this space in rainy weather as well as during the winter months.
