Two years ago, something special appeared on the corner of Pulteney and Rundle Streets in Adelaide. The Adelaide City Council had been looking for a way to rejuvenate a tired area of the city, and, after a pitching process, awarded the honour to Fusion to develop its Rundle Lantern concept in the space. The lantern is made up of 748 square panels which are lit up by an LED (Light Emitting Diode) system and cover almost 40% of the building. The lantern has been part of Adelaide’s art scene, playing a role in both the Adelaide Fringe Festival and Adelaide Festival, and increasingly opening up opportunites for budding creatives to develop content.

We sat down with Fusion’s co-founder and creative director, Damien Mair, who guided us through the loops of taking a loose concept and translating it into the illuminating force which is now a landmark in Adelaide.

The Rundle Lantern

Please tell us a little bit of background about The Rundle Lantern project.
Fusion were one of six firms invited to pitch for the opportunity to invigorate the corner of Pulteney and Rundle Streets, creating a gateway to Rundle Mall. We were a definite ‘wild card’, as we were the only non-architectural firm asked to submit concepts. Our pitch focused on transforming the car park on the corner of Rundle and Pulteney Streets, a well-known city building. Our design solution was to create a ‘lantern’ for the city to use as a dynamic cultural canvas.

The competition was tough, but our bold, simple ideas engaged the Adelaide City Council. The other concepts submitted, all required new building, landscaping or form. Our vision was to add beauty to people’s lives without affecting the environment, to work with current structures, and to put Adelaide on the global map.

Construction of The Rundle Lantern

The Rundle Lantern- facade complete

Where did Fusion’s inspiration for The Rundle Lantern come from?
We submitted six different concepts initially, so there was a bit of evolution from there on the original concept. Initially the idea was just wrapping the building with some type of material, but we didn’t know what it was at that stage that would activate it into being a surface that could be used for an artistic approach. It was a really loose concept.

How it evolved from there was that our idea really resonated with the Adelaide City Council because they owned the building and therefore the feasibility of implementing something was a lot higher than other competing firms who put forward concepts that would mean interventions on buildings occupied by private tenants or building a large scale infrastructure over the intersection (both of which have many implications).

The Rundle Lantern Vertical multicolour

Can you explain the process involved in developing the lantern?
Like many projects you don’t know the constraints that you are dealing with from the outset. We did know the building that we had the opportunity to work on and we roughly knew the budget that we had for the build of the project. But we didn’t really know the details of the actual infrastructure of the building, so when we actually started investigating the ways that we could wrap the building to make it a surface (within the budget) we found out that the building had a limitation – it’s a naturally ventilated car park which means that there has to be certain amount of air flow through the building.

So we explored lots of different methods of how we could create a surface that we could either project on or that would light itself, but also maintain the airflow status. We started exploring things like using wire mesh (meshes that are used in the mining industry to filter different levels of gravel). We experimented using woven plastics, using actual LEDs that were actually projected outwards, but that basically had to get scrapped because it wasn’t in the budget.

So we ended up finding inspiration from the louver windows that are on the back of many old houses in Adelaide. We also found a train in a train museum that had louvers on it made out of steel and was used for animal transportation. That’s really where the idea of having panels that were angled came from – so that we could maintain airflow. And then we orientated those panels so that when you were down on the street and looked up, you would see a ‘flat’ surface.

The next thing was how we were going to illuminate and project onto this surface. We investigated using industrial projectors which would be mounted onto other buildings but they’re really expensive and would be quite unreliable so that wasn’t an option. So LEDs became the illumination tool of choice.

Because we had a small budget we had to be inventive. We were looking at light and thought – let’s use reflection as a technique. That was where we came up with this concept that we would put LEDs at the base of each panel and then they illuminate upwards using reflected light so we could get a square metre of light on just a small LED.

The Rundle Lantern

The Rundle Lantern

How does The Rundle Lantern compare to other projects which Fusion usually takes on?
It’s quite different. It was quite a collaborate project – we had a service engineer, structural engineer and an architect involved, as well as the people that we worked with on developing the LEDs and how that all were wired into the building. Then also the actual manufacturer who built the lantern – we underwent a process where we built all of the lanterns offsite, prewired them all, put all of the panel on, tested them, brought them to site and then lifted them on with a crane and ‘plugged’ them all together.

The Rundle Lantern is different in terms of our typical projects but the same kind of design thinking that we always apply, we applied to this project. The medium was just different. We didn’t know anything about DNX which is the protocol we use to tell these LED’s to turn on and off – now we’re experts at it!

What features of The Rundle Lantern are you most proud of?
We’re proud of the fact that we’ve invented something is unique and innovative. It’ll be there for the next 50 to 60 years at least, and it’s become a landmark for Adelaide. We’ve created a platform which is a hybrid of architectural form with digital, which is what Fusion’s DNA is, so to see those two different mediums brought together is quite exciting and it shows the opportunity that’s in that space for the digital and the real world to merge in the urban environment. We’re also proud of the physicality of it – we’ve combined existing materials together in an interesting way.

The Rundle Lantern

How often does the digital content screened on the lantern change? And who develops the content?
The frequency of change depends on different activities. The Adelaide City Council has a Content Control group. We’re on that group and there are people from the arts office, community and a couple of other stakeholders. People apply to use the lantern and the lantern is seen as a destination of public art. For example, one of the first things that we were able to get the community involved in was the Adelaide Fringe Festival, which was when the lantern launched. It was a programme called Lantern La Lumiere and artists and students who had an interest in the lantern were invited to come to a workshop. We did some training to show them how they could create content for the lantern and they went off and basically created their own content – and that was curated and became content that ran on the lantern for the period of the festival in Adelaide. We have a whole lot of content which plays every night – standard loops – which Fusion has developed. There’s looped content and time-based content but also events through the year.

Has the success of The Rundle Lantern opened up projects of a similar nature for Fusion?
It’s probably repositioned Fusion in a lot of our client’s eyes. They would have just thought that we were a digital agency. It’s shown them that whatever challenge is thrown at us we can handle and so it’s probably allowed us to open a few more doors.
We did a project last year where there was an exhibition which was part of the Adelaide Festival called Northern Lights. It involves illuminating all of the old buildings. One of our clients, Santos, an oil and gas company, sponsored the event and came to us and asked if we had any ideas beyond just putting their logo on everything. So, learning from the lantern, we asked, how can we apply that to people in public space taking photos? So we ended up coming up with a pop-up photo booth that allowed to get their photo taken on the spot. Their photo was then published onto the internet so they could grab their image and then share it.

Rundle Lantern simulator website

Anything exciting that Fusion is currently working on?

We’re typically working on between 30-50 different projects simultaneously at different levels of completion. We’re doing some interesting iPhone app development at the moment for a couple of clients. We’re doing an iPad pilot which is going to be using iPads as a point of sale, as a product selector in a retail environment. We’re rolling those out in Victoria and depending how they go, we’ll go national. We’re doing quite an ambitious integrated campaign at the moment for quite a conservative government agency – so we’ve managed to take them out of their comfort zone by finding a different way for them to engage with their audience which is a combination of digital and traditional media. Overall we’re really trying to push the innovation… not just do the easy answer. We’d rather put in some more effort and convince the client that there is another way.

To read more about the lantern visit rundlelantern.com.au.

Watch the video below of the launch of The Rundle Lantern in October 2008:

Rundle Lantern Launch from Fusion on Vimeo.