“Light and music have the same characteristics,” Croatian lighting designer Dean Skira says. “They are invisible, but they both influence our emotions.”
For the Interior Design alumnus, emotion is both the starting point and the goal of any lighting project, regardless of whether it is for a public park or memorial, an arena, an office building, or a luxury hotel. His work may be technical and precise, but it is very much art: Before he completes a project, he must be moved by the play of light and shadow—and the “consequence,” the feeling that arises when the eye perceives a space.
“We don’t do lighting for architecture, We do lighting for people.” —Dean Skira
This human-centered approach has brought international acclaim and plenty of business for his 12-person eponymous firm. The company has won 50 major awards, including 15 for innovative light fixtures, 30 for lighting design, and five for the company’s own office building, the House of Light. That last project is a surreal white box in seaside Pula, Croatia, with indentations that collect geometrical shadows that shift as the sun crosses the sky.
Skira fell into lighting design by coincidence. He was working as a computer programmer in Croatia, employed by a Yugoslavian electric company. He devoted two years of his spare time to building software to automate the maintenance of the region’s high-voltage infrastructure—and the company did not even consider his plan. Disappointed and disillusioned, he left the country in 1986 to study architecture in New York.
A friend of a friend connected Skira with a job at a lighting showroom on the Bowery, working for the lighting designer Eduardo Rosso. Skira fell in love with the romance of lighting and, forgoing architecture school, took Interior Design courses at FIT, the only college in New York that had a lighting lab. In 1994, he moved back to Croatia and founded his company.
These four projects offer a brief overview of Skira’s work.
EVOLUTION TOWER
Moscow, 2019
The Evolution Tower is a 55-story skyscraper in the shape of a double helix like DNA, designed by British architect Tony Kettle and Scottish art professor Karen Forbes. Skira planned a comprehensive, fully automated lighting system for the interior and exterior that is not only stunning, it also saves millions in electricity costs.
The project was incredibly complex. Each floor of the building was rotated 2.5 degrees, but the stairways and elevators remained in the same place, which made every floor plan different. Existing fixtures on the market would not offer the precision Skira needed to provide consistent illumination to the oddly shaped rooms, so he developed a new energy-efficient LED. Their small size made them easy to install, and the fact that all 24,000 of these lights are identical simplifies maintenance.
The lights dim in the evenings to match circadian rhythms, and the window shades are programmed to harvest daylight, an energy-saving technique of supplementing artificial light with sunlight.
Skira also lit the outside of the building to display its unique shape to the city—but because of extreme temperature swings in Moscow’s summer and winter seasons, he positioned 3,500 light fixtures inside the windows, pointing outward. The network of LED fixtures can be programmed to put on a show.
Because of the system’s precise modulations, the tower emits minimal light pollution. And it saves 3 million euros per year in electricity costs, enough to pay for itself within seven years. “No bank on the planet would give you that rate of return,” Skira says.
The Evolution Tower won an Illuminating Engineering Society Award and a LIT Lighting Design Award for energy savings.
NATIVITY SCENE
Vatican City, 2022
Every Christmas, the Vatican is the focus of celebrations around the world. For the 2022 season, Skira was given the high-profile assignment of lighting the Nativity scene in St. Peter’s Square. Woodworkers in the town of Sutrio in the northeastern region of Italy carved 18 life-size sculptures depicting the crèche, and Skira needed to bring them to life with light.
His team first scanned all the sculptures to create a 3D model, because the scene would be far too complex to plan with a hand-drawn map. Once on site, they used an intricate system of reflectors to illuminate each sculpture without revealing the light sources: For Skira, seeing the fixtures detracts from the effect. Then they synchronized the lighting to music, infusing the reveal of each sculpture with drama.
In the show, which took place every evening from Dec. 3, 2022, to Jan. 8, 2023, the angel appeared first, as if calling the people to attention. Then light shone on the children, followed by the other townspeople and the Three Kings. Next, Joseph and Mary were illuminated, and finally, to a swell of organ music, the baby Jesus glowed with light.
The greatest reward for Skira from this notable assignment was meeting the Pope. “I had the privilege to shake his unbelievably warm hand,” Skira says. “It was a very touching emotional experience.”
HOUSE OF LIGHT
Pula, Croatia, 2006
Skira’s own office building, which he calls the House of Light, is both a beautifully considered workplace and an award-winning minimalist showplace. Every surface in the 7,500-square-foot building is white—floors, walls, and ceilings—an ideal canvas for Skira’s medium. (One presentation room is dark.)
A lighting lab on the upper floor exhibits the latest technologies. As with many of Skira’s projects, most of the fixtures throughout the building are hidden, so that the illumination seems a natural extension of the architecture.
“I wanted to prove that what is coming out of the fitting is more important than the fitting itself. If you go to a mechanic, you don’t need him to show you all his tools. But without the tools, he cannot fix your car.”
The deep window niches, affording generous views of the picturesque Soline Bay, are not just striking; they prevent the hot summer sun from shining directly into the building to keep cooling costs to a minimum. Solar panels on the roof absorb enough energy to accommodate the building’s electrical needs.
At night, dramatic splashes of colored light play on the white exterior. An artist friend of Skira’s chose the colors to match Piet Mondrian’s most famous painting, “Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow.”
ROMAN THEATER
Pula, Croatia, 2022
The only preserved and functional theater built by the Roman Empire still in use is located in Skira’s hometown and headquarters of Pula. The theater was recently modernized with a 4,000-seat steel seating structure and a huge LED video screen on the adjacent archaeological museum. The town hired Skira to bring in effective and dramatic lighting.
Skira created four preset scenes: one with impressive lighting for tourist visits, a second with low light to be used during events, a third to facilitate ingress and egress before and after events, and a fourth with basic security lights to be used during the winter, when the theater is closed.
The theater was built with two colors of stone, a cool gray and a warm sand, and Skira matched the color temperature of the lights to the hue of the stone. With the press of a button, the lights can turn a deep red.
Construction took much longer than planned. When the developers dug deep to stabilize the steel structure, they kept hitting architectural elements, such as foundation walls and a water reservoir, that needed to be excavated. The dig also breached the Zerostrasse, the underground tunnels used to shelter the population during World War I that are now a tourist attraction. (Skira also designed the lighting for the Zerostrasse.)
Once the excavation was finally complete, his team placed the 200 lights as they usually do, working at night to observe the effect and adjust the intensities, and using special cranes to position the fixtures in areas too high to reach. No simulation can predict how light will reflect against stone, so a hands-on installation was crucial.
As usual with Skira’s projects, the fixtures are all hidden, so that viewers see only the effect of the light, not the source or the glare.
All told, from conception to execution, the project took a full decade. “Our job usually takes years before the conceptual part is realized,” Skira says, “but not ten years.”
Construction took much longer than planned. When the developers dug deep to stabilize the steel structure, they kept hitting architectural elements, like foundation walls and a water reservoir, that needed to be excavated. The dig also breached the Zerostrasse, underground tunnels used to shelter the population during World War I that are now a tourist attraction. (Skira also designed the lighting for the Zerostrasse.)
Once the excavation was finally complete, his team was able to place the 200 lights as they usually do, working at night to observe the effect and adjust the intensities, and using special cranes to place the fixtures in places too high to reach. No simulation can predict how light will reflect against stone, which is why a hands-on installation is crucial.
As usual with Skira’s projects, the fixtures used in the project are all hidden, so that viewers only see the effect of the light, not the source or the glare. All told, from conception to execution, the project took a full decade.
“Our job usually takes years before the conceptual part is realized,” Skira says, “but not ten years.”