The Five Sides of Plusminus at Fourth Space

This is 4th Wall, a new temporary arts venue from the designer Stefan Diez whose first installation highlights the versatility and beauty of his Plusminus lighting collection for Vibia. Throughout the space, Diez’s studio has created five different installations that show off the creative potential of Plusminus, a radical lighting system that replaces concealed wires with flexible, conductive textile belts. Thanks to a range of different lamps that clip onto and off the belt at any point, Plusminus lets light flow anywhere.

Each installation highlights a different element of the system, and all have been installed such that they are framed by the five windows that look into the Preysing Palais’s 200sqm space – a stripped out store interior that has been left raw and bare. The first installation, for instance, features a series of 14m-long belts that slice across the ceiling of the room before dangling down into vertical arrangements of spotlights. It’s a display that highlights the flexibility and functionality of Plusminus’s conductive belts, which come together to create a textile canopy that runs the length of the room, all while providing simple and elegant lighting through spotlights.

While the first installation highlights Plusminus’s functional qualities, the second plays with the design’s emotive value. Here, a series of globe lights have been suspended on invisible wires from the ceiling, dangling above dark pools of water whose inky surfaces capture and reflect the glow of each lamp, setting it rippling with the movement of the water.

Between each lamp, the belt has been allowed to drape according to its own gravity, creating an emotional, evocative lighting constellation that is built up from just two simple elements.

A third installation makes use of Plusminus’s linear lighting, with Diez having pulled the belt into sharp, angular formations suspended above the water. With light marking out of the passage of the belt as it zigzags through the room, the installation reveals the potential for Plusminus to employed architecturally to demarcate space, as well as to create new lightweight forms in the air.

Cone lighting takes centre stage in the fourth display, where the belt has been allowed to drape into delicate forms which correspond to and complement the geometries of the lamp.

Across all of the installations, microchips included in each luminaire mean that the lamps can be individually programmed, allowing Diez to choreograph the movement of light across 4th Wall. With Plusminus, light is emancipated from the grid, giving designers the power to conduct electricity through a space however they might choose.

The fifth installation is the most modest, installed with spotlights within the smallest window in the space. The architecture of the Preysing Palais is protected under German law, meaning that any intervention in the space needed to be sensitive, lightweight and minimal. Yet thanks to the adaptability of Plusminus, and the fact that its textile belt ensures that its installation is non-invasive, Diez was able to entirely transform the space using light alone.

4th Wall was designed to encourage public engagement with design, with Diez having transformed an empty retail space into an outlet for experimental, public-facing design. As its name suggests, 4th Wall is a place where design and the city meet face to face. In keeping with these aims, Plusminus shows how great design can illuminate and elevate anything it touches.

Through the careful choreography of textile forms and the atmosphere created by light in motion, 4th Wall takes an empty space and conjured it into a world where design comes alive.

Credtis:
– Photography: Monika Hoefler
– Lighting design: Matthias Singer