FPOV global creative director Ingrid Baldwin shines a light on the human experience of public spaces.

There is no way around it — Ingrid Baldwin lights up a room. FPOV’s global creative director talks with such energy, warmth and passion about lighting design that it’s impossible not to come away excited by possibilities and aglow with a new appreciation. Baldwin is evangelistic about the way good lighting design can touch the lives of ordinary people and improve the way we experience the built spaces that surround us.

That energy has been widely rewarded, with her studio bagging an impressive list of international prizes, for both its projects and its staff. In 2021, Baldwin herself was named one of the world’s “40 under 40” lighting designers.

Despite this string of plaudits, Baldwin admits lighting design is a field that isn’t widely understood.

“My mum still doesn’t know what I do,” Baldwin tells inside. “If I had to explain lighting design, I’d say it’s looking at the built environment and then adding to it or enhancing it.”

These enhancements include lighting that is responsive to the time of day, allowing a restaurant space to be bright and fresh for breakfast and then cosy and intimate for post-dinner drinks. It’s all about influencing the human experience of being in a particular space, Baldwin says.

“The architecture and furniture are the same. The only thing that’s changing in the whole space is the lighting, but you can actually create completely different unique experiences, depending on the time of day.”

Based in Sydney, and established around the time of the 2002 Olympics, FPOV (formerly Point of View, TDLD and Firefly Lighting) was one of the world’s first independent lighting design firms and now boasts offices in places as far afield as London, Hong Kong and Dubai.

The firm’s glowing international reputation has been built on its ability to deftly and creatively interpret the sort of human experience architects and interior designers are trying to create. Although there is an increasing awareness of the importance of considered approaches to lighting, Baldwin says lighting design has traditionally been something of an afterthought.

“I think a lot of people think it’s just another layer over the top, but actually it should be stitched into the architecture,” she says. “A lot of design these days is constructed in a computer version of the real world, so at FPOV and as lighting designers, we consider part of what we do to be educating people about how light works and how we can create a better human experience through the use of well-considered lighting.”

This human experience is at the heart of the studio’s latest hospitality project, Antara 128. Based in the Melbourne CBD, the all-day eatery, from the team behind Sunda, Aru and Kudo, blurs the lines between early-morning bakery and late-night restaurant. This multi-purpose approach provided FPOV with an exciting challenge, as did the need to create intimate dining in a somewhat cavernous space.

The studio took a human-centric, holistic and embodied approach to create a number of different lighting scenes, which automatically respond to astronomical time — what the sun is doing, not what the clock is reporting. Vertical steel tube lighting descends over each table to create little bubbles of warm light for diners.

“The issue with a big space like Antara 128  is, if all your light is up high and there’s nothing where you are, it feels like a cave. So what we tried to do is draw light down to people,” Baldwin says.

The golden aura that suffuses Antara in the evenings is the result of a long and rewarding process of talking through aesthetics with the client and architects and working through concepts, schematic designs and construction drawings. But, it’s the practical — or “commissioning”— stage of fiddling around with the lights that Balwin particularly enjoys with projects like these.

“It’s really important as a designer because you learn a lot about how to create these experiences when you’re actually up a ladder,” she says.

Learning on the job has always been important to Baldwin, ever since she first joined FPOV as an intern in 2010. She admits getting the gig was something of a leap into the dark, as her university training had been in graphic design. Her application portfolio was dominated by life drawings, not lighting schemes.

“I knew nothing about lighting!” Baldwin explains. “I thought I did because I had been working at a high-end furniture and lighting retail store. The amount of knowledge that I have been able to learn and have access to is really interesting.”

While joking about her “rags to riches” ascent, Baldwin admits it is unusual for someone to stick with the same studio for so much of their career. What is it about FPOV that has kept her there for so long?

“I was thinking about that the other day, and I think I realised very quickly that as a lighting designer, which is a niche discipline within the built environment, I was always going to have more creative impact on a project than I would if I were a junior architect,” Baldwin says. “Maybe it was a little bit ego-driven, but I could instantly see that it was going to be more rewarding long term. And the diversity of projects is great.”

Diversity is key to FPOV’s design philosophy, which balances art and science and integrates specialist lighting with sound design — a consolidated approach that is strangely unique in a single lighting design firm. Their design team comes from varied backgrounds including architecture, interior design, theatre design, sound production, composition and graphic design. 

“I don’t think anybody ever sets out to be an architectural lighting designer,” Baldwin says. “We have a lot of people in our team who are architects or interior designers, who just somehow got interested in lighting. I personally trained as a graphic designer, although I’ve never worked a day as one. When I started with FPOV one of the directors said, ‘We don’t really hire lighting designers, we hire designers.’ You can teach lighting, but you can’t teach how to think or how to be a designer.”

The firm’s portfolio of projects is as diverse as its team, taking in innovative hospitality projects such as Antara 128, commercial rejuvenation works in London, and high-end resorts in Greece. It also includes grand civic projects such as the new Adelaide railway station, which has been redeveloped as part of upgrades to the city’s festival plaza precinct. 

The team worked on the new northern entrance, seeing the commission as a chance to redefine how a train station concourse could be lit. Baldwin, who led the team, says the challenge was balancing stringent compliance requirements against the desire to create warmth and human-scale moments within a vast public space.

“Train stations have a really high level of uniformity compliance lighting and the traditional approach has been to put lights in the ceiling,” Baldwin says. “What we tried to do was think about perceptual brightness, rather than just lighting the floor. You might have the right amount of light level according to the historical standards or the rail standards, but if the floor is too bright, your perception is that everything around you is darker.”

The answer was to make sure there were other lit surfaces in that space — such as walls and columns — which also helped the entrance become an inviting, transitional space.

“There’s daylight at one end, so it’s essentially like a tunnel,” Baldwin explains. “Theoretically, it should feel very cave-like but because you’ve got all this vertical light, it doesn’t. You don’t get that moment of disorientation as you often do when you drive into an underground carpark, when the change in light levels is too quick.”

Most of the work on the train station was done during lockdown, meaning the FPOV team didn’t get to visit the site until it was almost complete. Baldwin says she was blown away by the final result.

“It was even better than I thought it would be. The process was great too. Sometimes you do a project and the process is so challenging it makes it hard to appreciate the final product, but this one was a banger.”

The general public has been just as impressed with the train station quickly becoming one of Adelaide’s most Instagrammed hotspots. That sort of genuine human response — and exposure — is part of what makes civic projects so rewarding, Baldwin says. She hopes it’s an area of work FPOV will be able to explore further in the future.

“Lighting design, traditionally, can be quite an exclusive discipline,” Baldwin says. “I’ve actively shifted the type of work our studio does in order to find more meaning in what we do because everyone deserves good design.”

Antara 128 photography by Haydn Cattach. Adelaide Railway Station images supplied by FPOV.

This article originally appeared in issue 119 of inside magazine. Order your copy here.