Speirs + Major, along with Studio Fuksas, were part of the competition winning team to create a new global headquarters for finance house Guosen Securities.

Located in a prominent site in Shenzhen’s new Central Business District the tower has a vertiginous central atrium space at its core. This angular space links the entrance lobby and podium to the sky garden at the top. Internal and limited external light will be carefully composed together to create an elegant after dark image of the tower, defining the project and expressing the clear confident image of the Guosen brand.

One of my key inspirations is the great first century Byzantine church, Hagia Sophia, in Istanbul. The following is an extract from The Silientary's Poem, by Paulus, son of Cyrus, written in 563 AD. It covers all aspects of the Hagia Sophia and must surely be one of the first ever written statements on light.
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Satu and Iain will both be speaking at the Professional Lighting Design Convention 2011. The bi-annual event is to be held in Madrid in October and attracts over 1000 international delegates. Satu will be discussing masterplanning and strategies for urban lighting in a lecture entitled "Recasting the Night" and Iain will be exploring symbolism, signification and vocabulary of light in "The Meaning of Light – Towards an Illuminatory Semiotics".

Satu Streatfield has been invited by Gaudrè, a lighting manufacturer in Vilnius, Lithuania, to deliver a series of lectures on Friday 4th March to an audience of architects and interior designers. Her talks will predominantly focus on urban lighting and the way in which new technologies and sustainability criteria are impacting cities after dark. She will include an overview of some of Speirs + Major’s projects, including Durham Light and Darkness Strategy, Greenwich Peninsula Lighting Strategy and Sackler Crossing to illustrate her arguments, and also hopes to have some time to speak informally about her inspirations, the love she has for light and why she thinks everyone else should love light too!

Jonathan Speirs ponders on why he loves the Edinburgh skyline in this month’s Homes and Interiors Scotland.
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Mark Major has accepted an invitation to be keynote speaker at SPARC International Lighting Event, Australia’s first major conference for the international lighting community, to be held in Sydney on June 6-8.

Mark’s talk, entitled ‘Light is for People’, will explore fundamental questions about electric light: its role, the benefits it brings and the consequences of using it – such as energy use, light pollution and adverse impacts on bio-diversity – and how the work of Speirs + Major not only embraces these ideas but also attempts to take the dialogue further through our work approach. Examples of this – from light masterplanning through to both large and small scale architectural projects – include the award winning Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi and Maggie’s Cancer Care Centre in London.

Mark will also showcase the new and exciting directions our practice has been taking in the world of branding and product development, which include working with the likes of Armani, Sony and the BBC, and how we are actively exploring new approaches, techniques and ways in which we can harness exciting, developing technologies to help meet our future needs.

Astronomy photographer Chris Kotsiopoulos did an experiment to show the sky from one morning to the next in a single picture. You can read the full explanatory story of his project here. Have a look at the site of Chris Kotsiopoulos for more quality astronomy pictures. source: Earth science picture of the day

Speirs + Major are pleased to be working on a lighting study for Peckham Rye Station, in conjunction with well-known architect Benedict O’Looney and Southwark Council. It is hoped that from this study the lighting to the entrances, facades, forecourts, arches and all other public spaces will be vastly improved, thereby creating a safer and better-lit environment for what many believe to be the gateway to Peckham’s centre.

Keith, Mark and Jonathan are keynote speakers at this year’s Lightfair conference held in Pennsylvania, USA. The subject of their talk, The Spirit of Light, will compare and contrast their use of light in two significant religious buildings, the Grand Mosque of Abu Dhabi and St Paul’s Cathedral, London.

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Cartier Circle, the gateway to one of London’s financial epicentres, Canary Wharf, was completed recently after being developed by Canary Wharf Contractors, along with Speirs + Major. In designing the lighting design, the aim was to enhance safety and security whilst creating a more enjoyable place to be and reinforcing the concept of Cartier Circle as a visible landmark and primary gateway to Canary Wharf.

In order to do this, large art-posts were erected in the median of Cartier Circle, with sparkling top lights reinforcing the visibility of the site, and at night creating a navigational presence amidst the tall buildings and dark sky. This was further enhanced by uplighting the art-posts and surrounding trees, and adding a contrasting downlighting effect also on the trees, creating drama with pools of light on the footpaths and bringing the light down to a human scale.