Habitare’s Ahead! Made a Statement for Design

Finnish architect Vesa Honkonen created the high-profile Ahead! design section at the Habitare fair, playing with contrasts and light.

“The biggest challenge in trade fair architecture is the fact that each exhibitor designs their booth independently,” Honkonen explains his task, which included the design of the overall Ahead! exhibition hall concepts including lighting, as well as a special area for seminars.

Ahead! was dedicated to Finnish and international design at the Habitare Furniture, Interior Decoration and Design Fair, held in Helsinki from September 9th to 13th, 2009.

Light vs. darkness

One of Honkonen’s specialties is lighting design – designing and defining space with light.

“My idea for lighting in Ahead! was darkness,” he explains. He would produce as much darkness as possible, by covering all sources of natural light and turning off the fixed lights in the exhibition hall. This allowed the booths to glow with their own lights. The overall atmosphere was thrilling.

“A colleague hailed this as my best lighting concept to date,” Honkonen says.

A Forum of contrasts

Honkonen’s starting point with the seminar space, called the Forum, was not to compete with the booths but to draw visitors’ attention by other means. His solution was not utilising coloured lights and glitter – there would be plenty of those on the booths – but something more artistic.

He made the Forum round and separated it from the exhibits with outward leaning canvas walls. A black-and-white film produced for the purpose, with dancer Reijo Kela in the role of “Mr Design”, was projected onto the canvas with a rotating projector. “We wanted to personify design and give it a body,” Honkonen explains.

The film reflected on the porous and translucent fabric created a dim and moving lighting effect that contrasted sharply with the bright and clearly defined contours of the exhibits.

Finnish forest brought to the design fair

Mr Design wandered in a Finnish forest, sometimes slowly and painfully, sometimes animated, as a metaphor of design processes. The Finnish forest brought to Ahead! reflected the closeness to nature of Finnish design.

The Forum was lit with three light sources, all equipped with sound, and they intermittently shouted “Ahead!” Honkonen comments, “The shouting lights claimed the space in a subtle way.”

The Forum was furnished with 100 chairs that had been collected from 70 different manufacturers, including old classics and new pieces. “People were thus given an opportunity to experience a wide variety of different chairs in one place,” Honkonen says.