A small installation for a bar at Lumiere London, the city-wide light festival that ran across four evenings from 18 to 21 January 2018. Ours sat at King’s Cross.
The brief was no cables
The challenge was set by the site rather than the design: outdoor bar tables, in a public space, with no trailing cables at all.
At a festival where hundreds of thousands of people move through in the dark, a cable run across a walkway is not a tidiness problem, it is a trip hazard and it will fail a safety inspection. The tables had to be completely self-contained.
Battery power, wireless control
Each cube was built around a rechargeable battery, so it could stand anywhere without being tethered to a supply. At the end of each night a single cable was plugged in to charge it ready for the following evening.
Control runs wirelessly from a small lighting console, so ten cubes spread across an indoor and outdoor bar could still be treated as one set.
Waterproof, because they hold drinks
As with all our equipment the tables were fully waterproof, which mattered twice over here: they stood both inside and outside the bar marquee, and their entire purpose was to have drinks put on them.
The table tops were made specifically for this bar, using the same materials as the bar’s own build, so the cubes read as part of the design rather than as lighting brought in and placed nearby.
