Riga Motor Museum

Reconstruction of Riga Motor Museum

 

June 2016

Riga Motor Museum continues the traditions of the Antique Automobile Club of Latvia and its enthusiastic members – the founders of the Riga Motor Museum in 1989.

After large-scale reconstruction, which began in 2013, the museum has gained a broader and more modernized exposition space, a comfortable and enjoyable environment for visitors, as well as accessibility for everyone.

The exposition offers more than 100 unique vehicles, and new significant additions are constantly being made to the collection.

The exposition of antique vehicles has been created as an exciting story about unique vehicles, outstanding individuals and the most critical historical events in the world of cars.

At the moment visitors can use modern, diverse multimedia and designs to participate in various interactive activities and to follow the story of vehicles. Historic vehicles portrayed in a modern form makes the visit to the Riga Motor Museum a truly exciting and unique experience, as well as worthy of study.

A separate changeable exhibition hall and a modern conference hall ensures varied and dynamic operation. For the visitors’ convenience, the museum offers a café and a playground for children.

A fully renovated and reconstructed Riga Motor Museum was opened to visitors on 2 July 2016.

The reconstruction, which began in 2013, consisted of two major stages:

• construction stage, during which the building was reconstructed;
• restoration of the exposition in accordance with a design project.

The renewed exposition had to become modern, interactive and able to compete with European museums, attracting both local and foreign visitors.

Exhibits at the Riga Motor Museum – the historic vehicles – are very inviting objects, because they address a large audience. However, these objects add an additional pressure to the overall design of the exposition, which is aimed at highlighting each vehicle and its uniqueness, at the same time keeping the informative and interactive parts of the exposition, and maintaining a single design idea.

To implement the intention of Riga Motor Museum and the author of the design project  H2E, a general partnership SMSJ, including SGS Sistēmas, was established. Each partner was responsible for implementation of particular tasks. Our company was responsible for the lighting system of the entire exposition. We also supplied specific AV and audio system equipment, installed by SIA Solavi.

Reconstruction of the Riga Motor Museum has been the largest and most ambitious museum project yet in Latvia, therefore the reconstruction process was often a step toward the unknown. Lacking precedents in Latvia, much time was invested in studying and understanding the implementation of similar projects around the world, which was not always helpful to the situation, due to the objects of the exposition and the singularity of the space.

SGS Sistēmas and other parties involved in the process had a great responsibility on their shoulders to successfully implement the project; much time and effort was invested in the process to plan and design the most suitable technical solutions.

The process was full of challenges. Lighting the vehicle exposition is not a particularly easy task, moreover, it has to be taken into account that a bright and light-coloured car may be put beside a deep black car, with a colourful interactive video wall in the background.

The task was to gather all these objects in one picture without losing their individual design and task. Before planning the light installations, it was determined that light from spotlights should not damage the colour and details of the historic vehicles, which meant that spotlights with gas-discharge or other type bulbs had to be used with IR and UV preventative filters. Therefore, many spotlights with LED elements were used. However, in places with lower ceilings or with large objects to be lighted, spotlights with a higher light capacity were installed. In these situations, spotlights with bulbs in dimensions smaller than LED spotlights of similar capacity were used.

“Lighting systems implies not only the duty to light up the exposition but also to inform – moving light arrows directing visitors, and projections of car manufacturer logos on banners hung on the ceiling. Making logo projections was another challenge and a task to implement something new. It might seem like no big thing, however banners hung on the museum’s ceiling are inclined from different angles. It was not possible to install the spotlights perpendicularly to the surface of the projection without distorting the image and making a trapeze. Eventually, by using special technology, each logo was produced separately with a ready-made trapeze correction to get a perfect image on the surface,” explained Normunds Eilands, head of SGS Sistēmas.

In total, the project included 582 different spotlights operating in a unified light management system, provided by MA Lighting grandMA2 management system.

The most ambitious project of the year has been finished, and we can proudly say that Latvia has the best museum in the Baltics!

Moreover, the technical staff of the theatre (opera) has previously worked with Clay Paky products, and have highly estimated their quality and reliability. The theatre lighting equipment already includes 8 Clay Paky Alpha Spot 700 and 4 Clay Paky Alpha Wash 1500. Now, 5 Clay Paky Scenius Profile have been added to their set.

Jurijs Fjodorovs – light designer. Peteris Brilts – manager of installation works.