< Previous10 Sightline Spring 2018 Ironic to have been asked to write about LEDs when, as you’ve hopefully noticed, the EU is proposing eliminating the availability of tungsten light bulbs for entertainment lighting. But yet interesting to observe one key difference between this round of the Save Tungsten campaign, valiantly led once again by lighting designer Michael Hulls, compared to the first cycle a few years ago. Then, the strongest response was ‘LED stuff just isn’t good enough for entertainment lighting.’ Now it’s ‘we accept that LED technology has become sometimes good enough, but we just can’t afford the lights or the new infrastructure they would require.”In other words, the technology in LED fixtures has improved… and since we are simultaneously embracing this new technology and desperately trying to hold on to an older generation, we are clearly at some kind of technological cross-roads. Which perhaps does make it a good time to see how we got here.It was somewhere around 2002-3 that entertainment lighting started flirting with LEDs. That’s forty years after the invention of these semiconductor devices that emit light by allowing electrons to re-combine with electron holes rather than by heating a metal filament. Initially they could only give out infra-red light, then low-intensity red, then by the early 1970s, blue. Getting to high brightness blue took another two decades, but that allowed the development of white and other coloured LEDs by using the blue light to energise a coloured phosphor to fluoresce.By the turn of this century, they were efficient (18-22 lumens per watt from a 5W LED, compared to 15lm/W for a 60W tungsten bulb), though not particularly bright. We adopted them for their strengths, usually wide coverage at A Potted History of Solid State Lighting in Theatre (or, How We Learned to Love the LED…)by Rob Hallidaylittle throw, or colour mixing from separate red-green-blue emitters, or low power consumption when hidden in a battery powered prop. Lighting designer Bruno Poet remembers “building LEDs into scenery for Magic Flute at Scottish Opera in 2003”; Paule Constable notes that she would have started “with practicals on a show that Howard Eaton was building”, and certainly HELL were early adopters of LEDs for effects such as the colour-changing portals on the original Mary Poppins in 2004 that might previously have been done with neon. David Hersey even hid some LEDs away in the proscenium area of Les Misérables when it transferred to the Queen’s Theatre that same year. New technology often presents challenges in areas beyond the particular technology: with colour mixing LEDs, because you were controlling the individual colours within a fixture directly, there was no easy way of mixing a colour then just turning the level down to half.Source 4 Lustr2 Photos: Rob HallidaySightline Spring 2018 11 Not long after, lighting fixtures started appearing using LEDs. Because red, green and blue LEDs were usually more efficient than white LEDs, the early fixtures – often simple flood or PAR-replacement type fixtures – usually packed together combinations of R-G-B LEDs, then announced that you could mix ‘any colour’ by controlling the relative brightness of the LEDs. Lighting a white cloth, that looked true. Lighting people, much less so – skin and costumes looked weird. While the LEDs were red, green and blue they were quite narrow bands of those colours; with them all on there were ‘gaps’ or ‘droops’ across the colour spectrum. Tungsten, by contrast, has a relatively even, consistent colour spectrum. It naturally makes things look natural, because at heart its light is fire, just like the light from the sun we’ve all grown up with.A few manufacturers started adding a fourth emitter, a white or an amber, to ‘smooth out’ these gaps. One went further: the US company Selador, whose fixtures included seven different coloured sets of LEDs. Even lighting a white cloth, their fixtures could produce a rainbow of colour that looked natural in a way no-one else’s could. Ultimately the company was acquired by ETC; their multiple-coloured forms the basis of ETC’s current product line. ETC, it turns out, will crop up a lot in this potted history.The best of these products also improved the fade quality, to the point where from about 2007, if you were lighting a cyclorama, using LED fixtures started to be a sensible approach. You could mix most colours. You could use dark colours without having to worry about them burning out. And since cyc lighting does tend to use a lot of power – a lot of high-wattage lights, often at high power if in a dark colour – the energy savings were useful. Though sometimes none of those were the reason for adopting the technology: for the 2008 tour of Mary Poppins the EvenLED cyc-lighting tile let us light a cloth with a throw of less then 40cm, something we couldn’t have achieved in any other way. Any other gain was a bonus. Again, though, a new control challenge: how to deal with a cyc that required 26 DMX universes. At least by now the grandMA console had solved the turn-it-down problem, adding a ‘virtual intensity’ function that just about every console has since copied.The other strength of EvenLED was that every panel gave the same colours. That turns out to be a hard thing to achieve with LEDs. A Sigur Ross Tour 2017 Lighting by Bruno Poet Photo: Johan Persson12 Sightline Spring 2018 new word entered our lighting lexicon: binning, or the tolerance across particular LEDs within a particular batch. Close matching was more expensive. One manufacturer, Prism, took an interesting approach, their fixture measuring its output and attempting to adapt itself back to a known output, compensating for variations in LEDs and also, theoretically, for changes in the output of LEDs as they aged – this then, and to a great extent still now, the great unknown of LED fixtures.So great for cycs, but what about for actual lighting? At the Broadway Lighting Master Class in mid-2010, lighting designer Donald Holder took to the stage to talk about his work, and about the tools of the future. He showed the Robert Juliat Aledin, a profile spot that looked much like the company’s existing profile spots but which used a completely different light source – an 85W white LED. It felt like it might be bright enough. More importantly, it faded really well, even right at the bottom end, and looked and felt like a tool we were already familiar with. Plus it introduced a new trick: because the beam was cool at the gate, you could make gobos for it out of plastic. Trouble was, ‘LED’ had already become synonymous with ‘colour changing’ in the theatre world.2012/13 was perhaps the start of the next big shift. Two products seem to have sparked this, taking two different approaches. One was to use LEDs to create a new form factor rather than just trying to replicate something existing. Various manufacturers had tried using LEDs to make moving washlight replacements, including that pioneer from a previous generation, Vari-Lite, with their big, loud VLX fixture. Others thought small might be better, packing individual LEDs into the front face of what came to be called ‘frying pan’ moving lights: shallow heads in yokes that had the advantage of being compact, light, and so also able to move quickly. Theatre lighting designers didn’t really enjoy these fixtures because the visible face of the lights just looked like a sea of dots. But add a lens to blend the colour together and give a wide zoom range to the beam and you had the Martin Mac Aura, which Paul Pyant used on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at Drury Lane in 2013, tucked away under the side boxes as a head high crosslight – exactly the kind of place you’d have seen Source Fours with scrollers before. Bruno Poet had found the same lights slightly earlier. “For the 2012 Sigur Ros tour, I had expected to base the design on tungsten moving lights, VL500s or TW1s; I was very suspicious of the quality of light from LED moving heads at the time. However, we saw a demo of those units against a Mac Aura, and the Aura just blew them away in terms of size, brightness, beams angles, and it did all the colours I felt I would need for that show.” So convincing was the light that the designer notes that “Auras have featured in most of my designs ever since.” The other approach: to take a familiar form, and turn it LED. Like the Aledin, ETC’s LED Source Four, which appeared in 2013, could be bought in fixed-colour versions, with tungsten or daylight colour temperatures. But there was also a colour-changing version, the Lustr+, based on the seven-colour system ETC had acquired with Selador and had been experimenting with ever since. These were the ones theatre lighting designers showed most interest in: if you were going to adopt this new technology, wouldn’t you want this particular strength it could bring, rather than having to keep sticking scrollers or bits of plastic on the front? Certainly this was lighting designer Peter Mumford’s rationale when he based his design for Old Times at the Harold Pinter Theatre around 20 of the Lustr+ fixtures as an onstage cross-wash. “They were brilliant for the long, slow colour moves I used on that show,” he recalls. “The lack of noise was useful, but mainly those smooth colour changes – and those mk1s were OK brightness wise.” Worth noting in any eco-discussion the other result of the Lustrs: since they couldn’t feel the heat in the beams, the cast complained of being cold. The solution: turn the theatre’s heating up.For the new theatre in Doncaster the next year, a rig of these lights was specified. Here an unanticipated bonus: a change of local government post-opening had meant a cut in funding. The Lustrs didn’t need the gel the theatre could no longer afford.The reason the Lustr+ found favour was that its light made skin and fabric look natural. Its seven colours - red, green, cyan, blue, indigo plus amber and white, cleverly combined so that in many circumstances (particularly when using the internal diffuser ETC offered in the gobo slot, and if not using gobos) there was little hint of this trickery visible in the beam, just a rich, natural feeling light. A year or so later came the inevitable Source Four LEDv2. Again this was available in fixed white versions, but also in a ‘Lustr’ colour-changing version again. Seven colours again, but with a twist: ETC replaced white with a pale green emitter, which they called ‘lime’. This filled in the gaps between the other emitters, and when combined with a deeper red LED gave a wider colour range than the Lustr+, including better whites, plus a much higher 14 Sightline Spring 2018 output – comparable to a traditional tungsten Source Four, albeit that this kind of comparison is hard because the Lustr wins in some colours, the tungsten unit in others. Perhaps crucial was the extra mile ETC chose to go, to solve the problems of earlier LED fixtures. The Lustrs faded well. You could set them to shift towards red as they dimmed down, like tungsten does. Their refresh rate was fast enough to not upset cameras (filming theatre sets filled with LED tape on cheap drivers can still be a nightmare of flickering sources). They were quiet and reliable – more so than a scroller. Most importantly, they were all calibrated to a known standard in the factory. This meant that if you ran a number of Lustr2s (or Lustr+s, or actually a combination of the two) in calibrated mode and set them to the same colour on the console (through another new language: hue/saturation), you’d get the same colour coming out of all the lights. The Aura also had a calibrated mode, but manufacturing both lights and console meant the colour library in ETC’s consoles suddenly became really useful: on an Eos you’d always been cable to call up Rosco68, but with most lights you’d get something vaguely greeny-blue. On a Lustr2 you got a dead-ringer for Rosco68 – or, miraculously, for any other colour you cared to name. This gave lighting designers a high level of comfort when starting to use this new tool, because it understood their language. “I use gel numbers as a shorthand – they are the Pantone reference for lighting,” explains Bruno Poet. Paule Constable agrees: “working with these lights, I tend to start with a number - the Lee colour I’d want to see”. The first advantage over a traditional colour changer is that you can get any colour at any time, without having to fret over choosing colours for a scroll or the order they’re placed in that scroll. The second, though, is that you can then refine that colour: “then I’ll push or pull it in a certain direction depending on how it is responding to the rest of the look,” Constable adds, “using the Lustr2s to make small tweaks depending on the actual moment – I love that possibility.” ETC pressed that advantage by adding the ability to control the route of colour fades – including a fade option with the comfortable name ‘gel’ that makes a colour crossfade just like a crossfade between traditional lights in different colours.The difficulty with new technology is usually finding a safe place to try it. Constable first started using the Lustr2s at the Royal Court, where the company’s then head of lighting, Jack Williams, decided to invest in this new tool. “Because they were in stock, we could just give them a go,” Paule Constable recalls. “I was sceptical at first, worried about the curve, the colour temperature, how they would really be. But being in a building where I could swap them out if they didn’t work allowed me to take the plunge - and there was immediately no going back!”In the few years since, LEDs in general and Source Four LEDs in particular have started to become almost as much of a standard tool as the conventional Source Four, at least for those who can afford them. One measure: for Tree of Codes at the Manchester Festival in 2015, the rig called for 26 Lustr2s, and getting them was tough on both budget and availability grounds. Less than two years later at Sadler’s Wells the house stock had all the Lustrs the show needed. They’re now everywhere, in new shows (Harry Potter, Aladdin, 42nd Street, Young Frankenstein), new buildings (Chester’s Storyhouse, which also has Robe’s DL7 seven-colour moving lights), even re-mounts of older shows (An Inspector Calls, Billy Elliot, Miss Saigon). The rental company White Light notes that it now owns more Lustr2s than it ever did scrollers. There is as yet no Lustr3; instead ETC have produced the more affordable ColorSource range for those who are happy to exchange a narrower colour range for a lower price. Other companies have added lime to their colour mixes; the range of price points covered is growing. It is amusing in passing to observe that David Cunningham, who created the Source Four, the HPL lamp and the Sensor dimmer and whose royalty on all of these is surely directly threatened by the rise of LED, also holds a patent on lights that colour mix using four or more colours…Of course the actual LED sources, which Old Times, Harold Pinter Theatre Lighting and photo by Peter MumfordSightline Spring 2018 15 come from a very small set of manufacturers, are ever evolving. The Lustr2 shows just what is possible with additive colour mixing. But recently there has been a surge in fixtures using bright white LEDs plus familiar cyan-yellow-magenta dichroic subtractive mixing, in High End’s SolaSpot moving lights or Martin’s new Encore range, which is finding fans even in venues where low noise is critical such as the Sydney Opera House’s Joan Sutherland Theatre and the new theatre in London’s Royal Academy of Music. In moving lights in particular, the glut of VL3000 and Mac Viper-generation fixtures available on second-hand sites suggests a very rapid switching to LED-based fixtures, doubtless because they offer significantly lower running costs (in terms of power use, lamp replacement and maintenances) than the ‘always-on’ arc sources. There’s a potential saving compared to tungsten too, of course, but the 2010 study of power use at Seattle Rep and other studies have shown theatre lighting rigs generally, and tungsten ones in particular, are already tiny consumers of power relative to a theatre building’s total use. This was a key part of the argument presented recently by the Association of Lighting Designers, the ABTT and others to the EU in response to their plans for tungsten (“which are almost like saying you can’t use a candle any more,” comments Peter Mumford): forcing a switch to LED wouldn’t bring about dramatic power savings, but would make massive quantities of fixtures into scrap for venues that could afford to upgrade, and would be massively, sometimes ruinously, disruptive and expensive to all the rest. And then there’s this: good as these new LED fixtures are, whatever form they take (and LEDs offer lots of options for new forms, though with everything from LED tape to GLP’s X4 batten and similar products there can now be a slight sense of ordering up lighting by the metre…), none can yet truly match the magical qualities of a tungsten light source, or the range of tungsten lighting fixtures available: “no LED parcan has that generous beauty of a CP62. No LED 5K yet that has that beautiful depth of field, that push, that quality of direction,” says Paule Constable. “parcans,” Bruno Poet agrees. “There is nothing that has that beautiful quality of light. And LEDs can not replicate birdies, or sunfloods, or Svobodas or beamlights…”“I thought I would miss tungsten more than I actually do, and frequently find myself with totally non tungsten rigs - and perfectly happy,” notes Peter Mumford. “We were all a bit doubtful that the LED generation would deliver the kind of subtlety that is required in the theatre, but I would say that has changed. Having said all that, I feel the same as I do about digital photography and film – I’d hate to see a world where there was no film, it still has a quality that digital doesn’t, and I guess the same is true of tungsten. In both cases it forces you to work in a different way. Let’s not let tungsten become extinct.”HeisenbergDirected by Marianne Elliott, designer Bunny Christie, lighting Paule Constable using EvenLED.Photo: c. Brinkhoff/Mögenburg16 Sightline Spring 2018 “It stands by itself as one of the indisputable masterpieces of human creativity, not only in the 20th century, but in the history of humankind”. Expert evaluation report to the UNESCO World Heritage Committee 2007 on the Sydney Opera House.“Help mould a better and more enlightened community” The words of New South Wales Premier Joseph Cahill in 1954.“Jørn Utzon made a building well ahead of its time, far ahead of available technology – a building that changed the image of an entire country”. Frank Gehry in 2003 when awarding the Pritzker Prize (architecture’s highest award) to the Sydney Opera House. Jørn Utzon won the competition to design the Sydney Opera House in 1957. He left Australia and the project in 1966. The building opened in October 1973 to universal architectural acclaim. Utzon never returned to Australia and never saw the Modern Theatres: Sydney Opera House The Modern Theatres series continues with David Staples discussing the Sydney Opera House finished building, possibly the most famous building of the 20th century. He died in 2008.The Sydney Opera House is undoubtedly one of the most important pieces of architecture of the twentieth century. But as an opera house and a concert hall it is severely flawed. Planning Planning for a new performing arts building in Sydney began in the late 1940s and was led initially by Sir Eugene Goosens, an English composer and the director of the New South Wales Conservatory of Music. Joseph Cahill, the Premier of New South Wales, got behind the project although he initially preferred a site near the Wynyard railway station. Goosens insisted on the Bennelong Point site. The site was known to the native Gadigal people of the Eora Nation as Tubowgule meaning “where the knowledge waters meet”. Cahill declared “This state cannot go on without proper facilities for the expression of talent and the staging of the highest forms of artistic entertainment which add grace and charm to living and which help to develop a better, more enlightened community and surely Photo by Andrew FyshSightline Spring 2018 17 it is proper in establishing an opera house that it should not be a “shadygaff” place but an edifice that would be a credit to the state not only today but also for hundreds of years”.Goosens’ ambitions were for a fine concert hall for the orchestra, with perfect acoustics and seating accommodation for 3,500, a home for the opera company and a smaller hall for chamber music.Competition The government announced an international architectural competition and the guidelines were released in February 1956. These called for a large hall to seat between 3,000 to 3,500 persons designed for: Symphony concerts;• Large-scale opera;• Ballet and dance; • Choral;• Pageants and mass meetings.The small hall should seat approximately 1,200 persons for: • Dramatic presentations;• Intimate opera;• Chamber music;• Concerts and recitals; • Lectures.Jørn Utzon, a 38 year old Dane with a small office north of Copenhagen, prepared his 12 page entry for the opera house competition, and it was given the number 218 out of the 233 schemes submitted. Judges and Judging The jury included Sir Leslie Martin who had been part of the design team for the Royal Festival Hall in London and the eminent Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen. An oft repeated, although occasionally disputed, story is that Saarinen was delayed travelling to Sydney and by the time he arrived the other judges had already established a shortlist that did not include Jørn Utzon’s design. Saarinen allegedly reclaimed Utzon’s drawings from the rejected pile and argued its merits. At that time Saarinen was designing his most famous building, the TWA passenger terminal, at New York’s Idlewild Airport (subsequently renamed JFK Airport). The TWA terminal opened in 1962 with a distinctive wing-shaped, tiled concrete roof. There is a considerable affinity between its design and Utzon’s opera house.These projects were designed at the height of the Modernist Movement and many of the other competition entries for the Sydney Opera House proposed similar modernist buildings. Saarinen, in New York and in some of his other work, was proposing a much more organic flowing form of architecture. Utzon in his early sketches was advocating a similarly radical design for Sydney.In January 1957 Premier Cahill announced the winner was Jørn Utzon, a virtually unknown Dane. The jury noted “because of its very originality, it is clearly a controversial design. We are however, absolutely convinced of its merits”. The cost was estimated at 3.5 million Australian dollars.The architectural competition was a loosely structured competition with a broad brief and minimal requirements for the competitors. Utzon won the competition with a series of loose sketches. Architectural competitions are often intended to service and develop young emerging talents and Sydney succeeded in this. Today, architectural competitions have become more and more structured and rigid in order to minimise risk to clients. The preamble to many architectural competitions says they are looking for new, emerging talents. But the formal requirements are then onerous to the extent they can only be met by established, tested architectural practices, including a Sir Leslie Martin, Jorn Utzon and Eero Saarinen (from left to right) c. RIBA18 Sightline Spring 2018 requirement for the competitor to list three comparative buildings completed in the last 3 to 5 years, and the requirement to have a certain level of insurance cover or a certain financial stability. The concept for the Sydney Opera House owes much to Utzon’s undoubted genius. But he himself acknowledged a number of influences that helped generate his concepts. As a young man, Utzon was taken by his family to the Stockholm Exhibition in 1930. Gunnar Asplund, a renowned Swedish architect and designer, was at the height of his powers and had a significant influence on the exhibition. Utzon remarked “Asplund is the father of modern Scandinavian architecture” “He progressed beyond the purely functional and created a wonderful sense of wellbeing in his buildings. He even included symbolic content imbuing each of his buildings with a unique personality, one that expressly emanates the purpose of the building, completely covering and expressing the function, the lifestyle, the way of life lived in the building”.Asplund influenced many other architects and designers. He worked with Sigurd Lewerentz on the Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm. Lewerentz was the architect for the Malmo City Theatre that opened in 1944 in the middle of the Second World War, probably the only theatre built in Europe in the 1940s.Finnish architect Alvar Aalto was also influential. Utzon worked briefly with Aalto in 1945 in Finland. Aalto went on to design the Finlandia Hall in Helsinki and the Alvar Aalto Theatre in Essen, Germany.In 1949 Utzon received a grant that enabled him to travel extensively in the USA and Mexico coming into contact with Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe and Ray and Charles Eames. His visits to South America also exposed him to Mayan temples and their influence.During the competition Utzon apparently pored over maps of the Sydney harbour and possibly images of boats and sailing ships in the harbour – the influence of which can be seen in the roof of the opera house.Finally, Utzon lived near Kronborg Castle in Denmark. This castle is built on a promontory with some similarities to Benelong Point. Kronborg Castle was immortalised by William Shakespeare as Elsinore Castle in Hamlet.Utzon’s winning design consisted of only 12 drawings. It was a sculptural scheme using the stunning location and a building designed to be viewed from all sides. Utzon won the competition on the basis of a few imaginative but undeveloped sketches.Design Once design commenced two problems were almost immediately identified – The geology of Benelong Point had not been fully surveyed before the competition. It was now discovered that instead of good, stable sandstones the site was largely composed of loose alluvial deposits soaked with sea water and unsuitable to support the weight of the structure. Mass concrete foundations were necessary at significantly increased cost.The second challenge was a lot of unknowns about the roofs. They had not been designed or engineered in any detail.Politically there was considerable pressure to start construction as quickly as possible to maintain momentum and avoid political opposition. Premier Cahill was in a hurry, he was 68 when construction began.It would have been wise to allow time to resolve design challenges and problems but this would have put the project at risk.In March 1959 construction of stage 1 – the podium – commenced and it was completed in February 1963, two years behind schedule.The project needed extraordinarily skilled structural engineering and Utzon was introduced to Ove Arup by Sir Lesley Martin and Eero Saarinen. Arup was one of the leading structural engineers of his generation and founder of the practice that still bears his name. Shells, Sydney Opera HouseSightline Spring 2018 19 The shells While the podium was building Utzon and his design team struggled with the design of the shells. His competition entry had relatively low, linear shells. The auditoriums needed much higher shapes and larger volumes. Between 1958 and 1962 the shell design explored various forms including parabolic, ellipsoid and finally spherical geometry to generate the final form of the shells. Utzon had a clear vision of the type of shapes he wanted in the shells while Arup and Partners in London struggled to devise a structural solution. Utzon produced the “red book” which contained a complete set of plans and sections which developed the schematic concept from his competition scheme. But the drawings were structurally unsound. Each shell was different and this unique solution would add significantly to the cost and complexity of the building.As the construction of the podium progressed resolution of the shells became a critical issue. Utzon struggled to develop a rational concept that could be engineered. A major breakthrough occurred when he observed that they could be derived from a single, constant form – a sphere. This would considerably simplify the sails, allow ease of repetition and allow the opera house shapes and forms to be engineered and realised. In January 1962 Utzon submitted the “Yellow Book”. In 38 pages of plans and elevations this set out the shapes, details of the ribs and the tiling. Its cover showed the principles of the spherical geometry.Construction and disputes With the design of the shells resolved, stage 2 – construction of the roof – began in 1963 and took three years. Utzon had moved with his family to Australia in 1963 but relations with the New South Wales government deteriorated. There were problems over rising costs, originally estimated at 3.5 million Australian dollars in 1959, they had risen to 13.7 million in 1962. There were concerns over Utzon’s ability to deliver all of the drawings required for the fitting out and interiors of the project. In 1963 there were significant changes to the brief for the project. At the insistence of the Australian Broadcasting Commission which ran the orchestra, the major hall which was originally to be a multi-purpose opera/concert hall became solely a concert hall. All of the stage equipment needed in this hall to accommodate opera and other types of performance were scrapped although a significant amount had already been installed.The minor hall, originally for stage productions only, was now required to house opera and ballet and renamed the opera theatre. Under Construction, 1968. Photo by Philip CNext >