Project Overview

Ambitus is an innovative high-performance luminaire designed for Austrian manufacturer Zumtobel, one of the world’s most well-respected lighting manufacturers. Yorgo Lykouria collaborated with Zumtobel over a ten-year period of extensive research and development, in a time when the lighting industry made the seismic shift to LED. This distinctive circular luminaire unites state-of-the-art technology with nuanced architectonic form.

Distinguished by a circular shape, Ambitus achieves optimal human centric lighting with maximum efficiency over a 360-degree light distribution, challenging a sector dominated by linear forms. With material lightness in a streamlined 24mm profile suspended by 1.3mm wires (distributing power and data) without visible electrical cables, this pendant luminaire achieves an outstandingly filigree quality that resides harmoniously within any environment.

Project Commissioner

Zumtobel Group

Project Creator

Rainlight Studio

Project Brief

Distinguished by a circular shape, Ambitus achieves optimal human centric lighting with maximum efficiency over a 360-degree light distribution, challenging a sector dominated by linear forms. With material lightness in a streamlined 24mm profile suspended by 1.3mm wires (distributing power and data) without visible electrical cables, this pendant luminaire achieves an outstandingly filigree quality that resides harmoniously within any environment.

As natural light sources such as the sun, are radial, this luminaire is designed to evoke associations with natural light phenomena for a more conscious spatial experience. The perforations on the underside of the luminaire accentuates the radiating quality to produce harmonious effects when viewed from different angles. AMBITUS’s perforated patterns were achieved using sophisticated computational formulas used for calculating supernovas.

Ambitus flexibly adapts to people's needs in the challenging and highly varied workplace environment, wherever that may be: The powerful uniform indirect lighting can be switched separately from the high-precision, glare-reduced direct light component. Thanks to tunable White, the colour temperature can be individually adjusted, thus supporting the concept of Human Centric Lighting (HCL). With a diameter of 60 cm and a luminous flux of 11300 lm, Ambitus is a true high-performance light engine. A single fixture optimally illuminates a 5 × 5 metre two-person office, replacing two linear luminaires.

Project Innovation/Need

Yorgo Lykouria observed that linear lighting systems tend to disrupt the order of increasingly prevalent complex architectural geometries, especially at night, when a building’s presence is mostly defined by its interior lighting. Mies Van Der Rohe declared that the lighting grid must follow and convey the building’s structural order in a night-time state. As architectural form evolves with complex geometry, and curvilinear form, the linear lighting model does not always find geometric resolution, expressing disrupted grids rather than order. Ambitus resolves geometric complexity because a circle is derived from a point; an array of points adapts to any geometry, it can change direction and follow modulated form over an array of many levels, without ever being oriented incorrectly.

It takes a sophisticated light engine to deliver such exceptional performance within the compact 24mm thickness of this fixture. Ambitus is a true synergy of design and engineering that disguises the lighting

prowess available within. It is the equivalent of a super slim laptop that packs a punch in the most compact proportions. At 600mm in diameter, Ambitus can handle the lighting requirements for a 5m x 5m two-person office, where two linear fixtures would have to be used traditionally.

The wireless control of this fixture also drive the design team to reduce the impact of visible cabling. Ambitus carries power and data over the minimal 1,3 mm thick cables that support it, so there are no visible electrical cables.

Design Challenge

In our research, there is not a single circular luminaire on the market that meets the workplace efficacy and glare control that Ambitus does. It just might be the world’s first. The long gestation period was required to resolve the challenges of manufacturing a circular luminaire in an industry founded on the extruded linear model. The design is driven by photometric optimisation with a will to reduce the fixture to its essential components, thus arriving at a streamlined aesthetic that lies firmly rooted in the legacy of modern design masterpieces.

It happens very often that innovation begins with an awkward start, however in this project, elegance had equal priority with lighting efficacy. Lykouria believes that a luminaire must wither be invisible in performing its function, or if it is present, it must be beautiful.

Sustainability

Our design process involved engineering from the very start so that we arrive at a luminaire which has energy efficiency by virtue of effective light distribution. A standard application of the office luminaire is to light a two-person office. Normally this requires two linear luminaires. Ambitus does the job with just a single fixture.

The design team was charged with the requirement for a sustainable fixture both in terms of energy se and also materiality. We designed the fixture so that after a long life, it can be dismantled into four components, plus the LED boards, and recycled. There are three visible yet elegant screws on the lower screen that are removed for this purpose so that we avoid using adhesives. Not including the boards, Ambitus is made of two materials: aluminium and methacrylate, both of which are recyclable.

This luminaire creates a spatial human centredness, forming a centre point, a gravitational pull for the act of gathering, much like a camp-fire, but elevated! Arrays of linear fixtures create the impression that we

are occupying an incidental moment along an infinite continuum. For the human being, this degree of insignificance is probably too much to bear. All human beings matter.