Before his tragic and untimely death last March, lighting designer Jonathan Howard had been due to present the final ILP ‘How to be brilliant’ of 2024 at LiGHT24 on museum and gallery lighting. Instead, his friend and colleague Peter Fordham offered up this tribute
By Peter Fordham
This ‘How to be brilliant’ talk was originally badged as a talk about ‘How to be brilliant… at museum and gallery lighting’, to be led by my dear colleague Jonathan Howard. Instead, I am very proud to make a tribute to Jonathan, an amazing and talented lighting designer, who passed away in March last year.
As Jonathan had already committed to giving this talk, I agreed to take his place. But I knew it wasn’t going to be an easy task. In fact, I would have felt a bit of a fraud talking about ‘how to be brilliant’ at museum and gallery lighting. I say that because I don’t regard myself as having the same skills, creativity and finesse that Jonathan had when it comes to museum and gallery lighting. I’m just not as ‘brilliant’ at it is as Jonathan was.
Instead, I am using this opportunity as a tribute to Jonathan and the legacy he left, including some of his approaches to museum and gallery lighting. Some of you may well have attended Jonathan’s 2017 ‘How to be brilliant’ presentation on the V&A’s ‘David Bowie Is’ exhibition of 2013 (‘Space and vision’, Lighting Journal, November/December 2017, vol 82 no 10).
It was a project certainly worthy of attention. It was, I believe, one of the most well-attended How to be brilliant lectures ever. That is of course, well, brilliant – but the rest of us at DHA find it remarkable because Jonathan didn’t actually like the exhibition at all; it wasn’t his design and he wasn’t involved in the project. But what he did do was nevertheless successfully deliver a really professional and in-depth talk.
PASSION AND AN ENQUIRING MIND
I first met Jonathan in 1992, at Imagination. One of the first things Jonathan taught me was that you don’t have to study engineering to become a lighting designer; you just need passion and an enquiring mind. Jonathan had both of those in spades.
I had studied fluid mechanics, pure maths and structural engineering as part of a four-year architectural engineering degree. Jonathan, on the other hand, had studied drama and began his career in the theatre.
One of the first projects we worked on together was to come up with a concept for lighting Croydon’s skyline. It was a competition organised by Blueprint magazine. I remember Jonathan’s passion and vision for projecting on to the high-rise facades of Croydon using theatrical large PANI projectors mounted on cranes or elevated platforms dotted around the town.
Jonathan and I then went our separate ways for a few years. I headed to Hong Kong and Jonathan joined DHA Designs. But we stayed in touch and met up a few times when Jonathan’s work brought him out to Hong Kong, such his work on the visitors’ centre for Hong Kong Telecom.
FLAIR FOR MUSEUM AND EXHIBITION LIGHTING
Back in the UK, Jonathan quickly began to show a flair for museum and exhibition lighting, combining his skills from the theatre with a mix of architectural lighting. The Wellcome Wing at the Science Museum was a game-changer. It really set the standards for future work and for Jonathan cemented a long-lasting relationship with the exhibition design company Casson Mann.
Despite an increasingly busy diary full of museum and gallery work, Jonathan still found time to take on architectural lighting projects. For example, his exterior lighting scheme for the Stanislavsky Factory Cultural Centre in Moscow. Many of the techniques that Jonathan was using in 2008 can still be seen in many of our schemes today.
The Medieval and Renaissance Galleries at the V&A were a very demanding project for Jonathan; it meant him working across a number of different gallery spaces within the museum. It was a project where really was blood, sweat and tears shed. But he held it together right from concept through to commissioning on site, often from a 12m-high cherry picker.
Jonathan was really passionate about hands-on commissioning; he would often carry bags with him to site containing every conceivable tool that he might need for the job – and not always related to lighting. In 2023, he revisited the Medieval and Renaissance Galleries project, upgrading it to LED and refocusing it to his original vision.
Jonathan also worked on a number of projects at the Royal Academy of Arts, including many temporary exhibitions and advising the academy on the most suitable track lighting kit to replace out-of-date fixtures. He was a keen art collector, so working directly with David Hockney on his Landscapes exhibition was a particular thrill.
JOAN CRAWFORD DRESS
For ‘Hollywood Costumes’ at the V&A, he lit a dress made for Joan Crawford for the black and white movie ‘The bride wore red’. Jonathan was tasked with showing what the dress looked like in the film, by taking the red out of the spectrum using green light and then showing how it really looked.
Jonathan was particularly proud when his work won awards, for example for The Atmosphere Gallery at the Science Museum in 2012, a project designed by Casson Mann. He immersed the space in a deep-blue wash whilst highlighting the key objects in warmer tones.
As Jonathan himself wrote in an article for FX magazine: ‘The lighting is designed to heighten the emotions and enfold the visitor in a space that reflects and amplifies the subject matter. As lighting designers, we are no longer simply concerned with revealing objects, but communicating concepts, creating spaces, and providing a richly textured visual landscape. The visitor experience is key.’
Turning his hand to façade lighting, Jonathan classically lit the exterior of the Science Museum in 2013, using warm-white LED sources concealed behind the first-floor columns and at ground level from the basement moat, lighting upwards. He picked up a Lux Award for that project.
He got to work on many projects at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, including the ‘Nelson, Navy, Nation’ exhibition in 2013 (pictured). It was a dark, narrow corridor but, to give it the sense of life at sea, Jonathan introduced rows of hanging white light LED sheets, a technology that of course was in its infancy in those days. This gave a series of ‘sails’ and also made the gallery feel bright and daylit.
HINTZE HALL
The lighting of the Hintze Hall in the Natural History Museum is one of Jonthan’s amazing legacy projects. He worked on the architectural exhibition and event lighting to create an absolutely beautiful scheme, for which a year later he won not one but two [d]arc Awards.
Working with Casson Mann again, and back at the National Maritime Museum, Jonathan created four distinct themes for the suite of Endeavour Galleries. This included Tudors and Stuarts and polar exploration, including introducing daylight back into the spaces.
Under lockdown in 2020, Jonathan introduced a daylight-reactive control system to the Dulwich Picture Gallery in south London; it was the early days of Casambi. But it was not without its challenges – such as the time he accidentally deleted the set-up from his mobile phone in the office, plunging the entire gallery into darkness from four miles away.
As we all know, the Covid pandemic hit museums and heritage sites in the UK quite hard, with closures lasting many months. So it was a relief for us all in 2020 when sites started to reopen. In September 2020, for example, Jonathan worked on the British Library’s ‘Hebrew Manuscripts’ exhibition, which explored the history, culture and traditions of Jewish people through the ages and across the world.
Jonathan helped design the ceiling feature, which was based on the idea of the Jewish diaspora, ‘the scattered people’. More than 3,000 LED lamps were used in the floating ‘cloud’ that hangs over the exhibition, punctuated by LED filament lamps.
When the Holocaust Galleries at the Imperial War Museum reopened in 2021, The Guardian reported: ‘The Holocaust Gallery is not dark and brooding but brightly lit, which is unexpected but right, as much of the holocaust was planned and carried out in plain sight.’ For many of the galleries, Jonathan used a wash of cooler white light on the pale, blue perimeter walls, using wall washers that shared the same lighting track as the spotlights, which in turn illuminated the objects with warm-white light.
FINAL PROJECTS
In 2023, Jonathan returned to Oman to commission the ‘Oman across the ages’ exhibition in Nizzer. The project was shortlisted in this year’s Museum and Heritage Awards. He led a team from DHA to focus and commission this project, working at very short notice, but of course he managed to get the job done and on time.
Close to where he lived in Twickenham, Jonathan custom-designed the flickering wall sconces that sit within the extraordinary interior of Alexander Pope’s Grotto. The project won a Civic Trust Award for conservation early last year.
Jonathan’s final project for the British Museum was ‘Legion’, a history of the Roman army. He was particularly proud of having persuaded them to take out the cabling from the floor channels and replacing it with a linear LED lighting strip to lead the visitors through the exhibition.
Finally, 25 years after working on the Wellcome Wing, Jonathan designed the beautiful lighting for the Science Museum’s ‘Zimingzhong: Clockwork Treasures from China’s Forbidden City’ exhibition.
This was an exquisite exhibition where each clock had ornate mechanical moving parts that were brought to life by his lighting.
Peter Fordham is director at DHA Designs
This is an abridged version of the full article, which appears in this month’s edition of Lighting Journal. Click on the page-turner opposite to read the full article.
Image: the 2013 ‘Nelson, Navy, Nation’ exhibition at National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, courtesy of DHA Designs
