Lighting Up Amsterdam

Ikeda picked the four Amsterdam sites while riding around the city on a bicycle. In Vondel Park, he and Rose installed five 2-kilowatt floodlights on the floor of the park’s ornate metal Music Pavilion to bathe the surrounding flowerbeds, pond, and trees in an intense white light.

To light Kurokawa’s Van Gogh Museum wing, Ikeda and Rose pointed five Robert Juliat projectors in the museum director’s office in the main building toward the protruding wall of the wing’s boxlike Print Room, painting it in white light. The office was “not directly opposite the illuminated wall,” Rose explains. “Therefore, we were framing the wall from an angle. The line you see on the main body of the museum is a result of framing the wall with light. This line helps define the protrusion from the main body of the museum.”

In the Westergasfabriek, a 19th-century gasworks turned into a park and cultural center by the landscape architecture firm Gustafson Porter, the designers mounted 68 narrow-beam projectors on the curved inner wall of one of the former brick gasholders. Walking around the water-filled container, visitors were attracted to its rim to discover the source of the intriguing bright light.

Across town on Java Island—a residential neighborhood in the east docklands master-planned by Dutch architect Sjoerd Soeters in the 1990s—Ikeda set up his largest installation on a 2.5-acre field at the western tip of the island. Arranged in a 5-by-5 grid, 25 narrow-beam projectors illuminated the night sky in a flamelike configuration.