The Boris Yeltsin Presidential Centre
The exhibition describes Boris Yeltsin’s life in a series of “Rooms”. Each one covers a separate period and the exhibition designers, RAA, designed each one to look different. Sutton Vane Associates designed the lighting of each room to be different to emphasise RAA’s changes of atmosphere. One dramatic room is about the horrific Chechnya violence. The whole space is bathed in red light. Visitors can look into bullet holes and see exhibits about the horrors lit in white light by concealed lights.
Another room has a real trolley bus. The original lights inside had been lost so the Sutton Vane team had to research1960s Russian trolley bus lights and get recreations made with dimmable LEDs. The bleak life before the reforms is shown by a recreation of a Communist shop lit by old fashioned looking fluorescent luminaires.
A recreation of Boris Yeltsin’s office in the Kremlin has the actual light fittings that were in his office. Sutton Vane Associates had to get them rewired and fitted with LED retro lamps that give out tungsten quality light. Yeltsin’s own car is dramatically lit. In the centre of the circle of rooms is a modern space, the benches are internally lit to show off their styling and the graphics, which introduce each room, are emphasised with lighting and their titles are internally lit.
