FROM A DESIGN “PAR EXCELLENCE” TO A PRODUCT OF EXCELLENCE: NORMAN FOSTER’S MCLAREN TECHNOLOGY CENTRE AND TARGETT’S PARAGON SYSTEM

50,000 cubic meters of water; 450,000 cubic meters of iron; 100,000 trees planted; over 4,000 people employed on the building site; over 4 million working hours.  And just one lighting manufacturer for the building described as a “XXI century model of industrial architecture”

THE ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN

“The realization of a dream and a place of innovation and invention”: with these words Ron Dennis, Chairman of the TAG McLaren Group, greeted the birth of the McLaren Technology Centre, his group’s brand new headquarters, which will be inaugurated in May.

The complex unites, under one roof, the various companies making up the Group (which specializes in top level engineering research and production, and is internationally famous above all for its Formula One successes), and covers an area of 50 hectares south of London. The complex was the brainchild of Ron Dennis who wishes to portray the values of excellence and innovation embodied by McLaren.

However, more than just a spatial projection of brand values, the building is intended to be a workplace designed to offer a high standard of wellbeing to the 850 people who work within it and – at the same time – an extraordinarily flexible space, which can support an unusual complexity and variety of functions: from vehicle production to marketing services, from pure research to product engineering laboratories, from administrative activities to high level in-house personnel training, as well as a Visitors and Learning Centre, for teaching people about the company’s historical heritage.  An additional element contributing to the complexity of this project was the need to ensure the high aesthetic quality of the building’s design in order to guarantee the confidentiality of the activities carried out inside, whilst impacting the surrounding environment in a non invasive way.

In order to find an effective solution to these requirements, McLaren entrusted the task of designing what had already been defined as “a model of industrial architecture for the new millennium” to a true icon of contemporary architecture, Lord Norman Foster. In order to transform Foster’s design into a truly excellent end result, McLaren called upon the best of international technology, bringing together a select group of partners who participated in the development of the project right from the early stages of its theoretical definition.

These partners include Targetti, a company whose experience gained in over seventy-five years of activity has been recognized and enhanced by its participation in this project, which is destined to go down in the history of architecture.

Paying strategic attention to the lighting factor, Foster and McLaren chose Targetti as the sole supplier for all the lighting fixtures throughout the building and in the surrounding areas.  Targetti – an official supplier to Mclaren since 1996, when it produced its pit lighting fixtures – enthusiastically welcomed the challenge of a vast, articulated project with diversified problems.  Targetti was able to meet this challenge thanks to its ability to satisfy the demands of even the most complex projects with the world’s widest range of lighting fixtures which perfectly suited the production areas (with the futuristic wind tunnel created for the aerodynamic testing of 1:50 scale car models), the leisure facilities (restaurant, swimming pool, gym), as well as the areas devoted to entertainment (museum, visitors’ centre, conference hall, exhibition area) and the park adjacent to the building.

"As an architect I have always been fascinated about light - how you engineer light, filter it, deflect it, diffuse it and pull it into habitable space and how that brings about another poetic human dimension, a dimension of change and unpredictability." said Lord Foster during the official presentation of the project at the 21st World Congress of Architecture in Berlin.

The results of the lighting project created by Targetti and the American lighting designer, Claude Engle, are truly poetic. The surprises begin right from the outside where, particularly at night, the scenographic sensation of the building conveyed by the atmospheric lighting décor is very much in evidence: from the entrance, which unwinds like a pathway of dotted lights resting on the hillside, a trail of light leads up to the lake which laps against the building where, thanks to underwater projectors placed along the perimeter of the elegant glass façade, the water is reflected on the overhanging canopy of the building which becomes a lake itself. The enormous glass wall, which filters the light of the internal building, becomes even more transparent and the recessed projectors in the flooring on the ground floor illuminate all the surfaces above them. The lighting makes the whole structure appear to dematerialize as it is approached from the raised walkway, where dots of light mark out the path and encircle the perimeter of the hill and that of the lake, creating an ideal link between all the elements making up the complex. 

However, it is inside the building that the relationship between natural and artificial, the inside and the outside, has been interpreted with cutting edge technological solutions made possible throughout the building by the application of a single fluorescent lighting system. This system was created by Targetti’s Research and Development Department in collaboration with Engle and Foster, with whom the company began working on this project back in 1998, launching a new concept of lighting design, which is no longer just another element to be inserted into a completed project, but an integral part of the same.

In keeping with McLaren’s expectations, and in accordance with the design choices made by the architect, the Paragon System is a single, extremely flexible product which can alter its design and performance to suit each of the many types of ambient characterizing the building: it is perfect for the office areas, where its low luminance levels prevents video terminal workstation glare, as well as the production areas, where it provides excellent illumination levels on the vertical plane.