Ruairí O’Brien LICHTDESIGN

RUAIRÍ O’BRIEN. LICHTDESIGN. is a company of the architect and lighting designer Ruairí O’Brien, especially in the field of lighting design.

Ruairí O’Brien is a lighting designer, architect, educator, artist and founder of RUAIRÍ O’BRIEN ARCHITEKTUR · LICHT · RAUMKUNST and RUAIRÍ O’BRIEN LIGHTING DESIGN.

For more than three decades, O’Brien has worked internationally at the intersection of architecture, light, art, and urban space, developing environmentally responsible and culturally meaningful design solutions for cities, public spaces, landscapes, heritage sites, buildings, memorials and lighting masterplans. His work combines artistic vision with technical expertise, ranging from custom luminaire development and daylight design to large-scale urban lighting strategies and climate-responsive architecture.

His projects have received international recognition, including a 2025 LIT Lighting Design Award for his urban lighting concept “Soundless Music” for the city of Potsdam, Germany. His projects are characterised by an emphasis on identity awakening of place and human interaction.

Alongside professional practice, O’Brien is Associate Professor and Head of Visual Design at the German University in Cairo, where he integrates professional practice, artistic experimentation, and emerging technologies into architectural education. His teaching encourages future architects and designers to think critically, creatively, and responsibly about the relationship between people, place, culture, and the environment.

As an artist, O’Brien has developed “Light Poetry”, a distinctive artistic practice exploring the poetic, spatial, and phenomenological dimensions of light through performances, sculptures, installations, paintings, architectural interventions, and urban projects. Working across scales—from intimate artistic experiments to city-wide transformations—his work investigates how light shapes perception, memory, emotion, and human experience. What begins as artistic exploration often becomes the catalyst for architectural and urban innovation, translating the poetry of light into the public realm.