2001 / 2005
Charlottesville, Virginia
Architecture
Interiors
Decorative Lighting Fabrication
District Design Approval Process
Public / Restaurant
Dunbar
Martin Horn Inc.
Mark Schuyler Lighting Design
Barb Wallace / Blue Ridge Graphics
Mike Christian / Monarch Concrete
Barnaby Draper
The Blue Light Grill opened in the early 2000’s, when nightlife was returning to downtown Charlottesville. Working with a narrow, deep, brick “party wall” commercial space, the design brief was to create a vibrant food and drink venue that could attract and hold a young clientele late into the night. In other words, it had to have sex appeal.
To show off the interior life and guests, we created an intimately scaled seating area immediately behind the glass storefront. The remainder of the space was dominated by a building-scale illuminated panel to create drama along the entire length of the room. The lit panel was intended to suggest the sensory experience of urban street life at night - moving cars, pedestrians passing storefronts.
With a limited budget and a desire to avoid recognizable decorative lighting, Formwork designed and fabricated two custom lighting types: suspended "squid" lights and 60 foot long illuminated wall panel. The squids were grouped in "pods" and animated the volume of the room. The illuminated wall, built up from carefully selected and proportioned theatric gels, dominated the space and defined the venue for decades.
Improved digital printing technology would enable the use of a photographic image across the back-lit panel, bringing detail and realism where the original graphic had been purely abstract. After testing several concepts and images, many relating to the seafood and sushi kitchen concept, an image of dancers was selected, and made somewhat abstract by over-scaling and aggressive cropping.
