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At Energizer, Arcturis made the lighting subdued and relaxing
in the lounge areas. |
ST. LOUIS DESIGNERS
MAKE
LIGHT THAT'S BRIGHT
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LIGHTING
SOURCES AND SYSTEMS HAVE BECOME MORE SPECIALIZED TO BETTER SUIT
INDIVIDUAL NEEDS.
By Peter Downs
It seems simple enough: you flick a switch up and the light goes
on, flick it down and the light goes off. The task of providing
useful artificial light is much more complicated than that however,
and getting more complicated all the time. Luckily, several St.
Louis consultants can help companies keep pace with lighting innovation
and put it to work for them.
Once upon a time, lights were a commodity like wheat. Utilities
handed out free light bulbs, and everyone used the same bulbs everywhere.
Lighting is not a commodity anymore. Driven by image, productivity,
and regulatory concerns, lighting sources and systems have multiplied
and become more specialized to better suit individual needs.
Compared to just three years ago, says Becky Egan, interior designer/project
manager at St. Louis-based Lawrence Group Colors, “companies are
looking to make a statement with lighting. It is not just for lighting,
but also esthetics...fixtures are so fantastic now they are almost
like art objects.” The esthetic uses include using fiber optic lights
to “wash” walls to accentuate curves or beautiful wall covering.
“People don’t want to walk into an office and have it feel like
an institutional environment,” she says, “they want it to look nice
and make an impression on clients. Lighting is one way to achieve
that.”
“In the ’90s, they couldn’t build buildings fast enough. Now, they
have to differentiate space,” says Randy Burkett, president of Randy
Burkett Lighting Design. “We do have some clients that say ‘we need
a building with something we can point to.’ Sometimes owners say
‘we want a lobby that will impress people. We want the lighting
to be special.’ Owners and clients are a lot more understanding
of the importance of light in their projects. When budgets might
get slashed, often lighting stands up to the test.”
That’s a big change from the last recession, when the lighting designer
often was the first to get cut when project budgets were trimmed.
What changed? Nearly everything.
Colloquially we may talk about “the lights,” but it is better to
think of lighting as a system with three parts. There is the light
source or lamp, which is often a light bulb, but not always; a light
fixture or “luminaire,” which is the piece of equipment wrapped
around the light source; and the controls, or switch. In the last
five years, there has been tremendous change and advancement in
all three.
Burkett notes that lamp choices now include more than incandescent
and fluorescent tubes. Customers also have options of light emitting
diodes (LEDs), induction lamps, compact fluorescent and fiber optics.
“LEDs may appear to many as trendy, but they are not,” Burkett says.
“It is a very well-grounded, robust technology with the legs to
gallop into many applications, and it is starting to mature as an
architectural lighting source.”
Burkett is using them to light the old Chain of Rocks bridge. “They
are an extremely long-lived source, up to 100,000 hours, so they
can be out for years before they need to be changed,” he says.
And, since they generate very little heat, they also are well suited
for such retail applications as cosmetic counters, chocolate displays,
and wall washers.
BECKY EGAN
interior designer/project manager,
Lawrence Group Colors |
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Other advanced light sources are induction lamps, the new fluorescent,
and fiber optics.
Induction lamps, Burkett says, are just beginning to catch on in
the U.S. after becoming popular in Europe. They are another long-lived
lamp, lasting up to 100,000 hours. When used in hard-to-reach areas,
such as high atrium spaces, it means the light bulbs can be changed
every six years instead of every year or two. “On college campuses,
where there are thousands of light fixtures, they can extend relamping
[the time between changing bulbs] and cut staff.”
The old fluorescent bulbs had a bad reputation because of their
color, but now “they are much smaller and can have a very nice color,”
Egan says. Compact fluorescent, for example, which are about the
size of a regular incandescent light bulb, are often used in place
of incandescent bulbs.
“There is a hotel in the Central West End where every lamp is fluorescent,”
Burkett says. “They have good color, they last longer than incandescents,
and they give off less heat.”
Then there are the new tube fluorescents that are slimmer, brighter,
and more energy efficient than standard tubes.
“We did one of the first installations of high output T5s in St.
Louis at the Solutia headquarters,” says Ron Johnson, design principal
at Arcturis. The T12s that many of us grew up with, and which are
now against the law, had a diameter of 1.5 inches. Standard T8s,
the T stands for tube and the number is the diameter of the tube
in eighths of an inch, are one inch across. The new T5s are only
5/8s of an inch wide.
The advantage of T5s is “they will put out...almost twice as much
light as T8s,” Johnson explains. But, because the new tubes are
so much brighter, the type of fixture you use is more important,
he says. “I think they are still on the fence in terms of technology
and application,” he adds.
Egan says the Lawrence Group Colors is using T5s at Washington University
now. Compared to the fixtures for T8s, the fixtures for T5s “look
so much better,” she says. “They look sleek...more elegant, like
something from the aerospace industry.
“The great thing about them is they are very good for indirect lighting,
for bouncing light off the ceiling to light a space,” she explains.
Indirect lighting is the great new wave in functional lighting applications,
a wave that is just beginning to move through St. Louis offices
and institutions.
“One of the things that is attractive about indirect lighting is,
if you positioned a light source every 12 feet off center and bounce
light off the ceiling, it fills all the space and avoids hot spot
conditions [i.e. bright spots] and dark spot conditions. It gives
better general illumination,” Johnson says.
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In the Enterprise Rent-A-Car/E-Commerce Group open
office areas, indirect and task lighting work together,
as designed by Arcturis. |
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When indirect lighting was first introduced, the fixtures cost much
more than did fixtures for direct lighting. However, the cost has
come down so much in the last few years, that “indirect lighting
can almost compete head to head with 2x4 overhead lighting in cost,”
Johnson says.
He was the design principal for offices for Enterprise Rent-A-Center.
“What was interesting at Enterprise was the ecommerce group,” he
says. “It is a very technology-driven development group. They do
tons of program writing and code writing on computers.” Ceiling
heights ran from 10 feet to 20 feet at its tallest in an old warehouse
space. “We used color-corrected indirect fluorescent lighting” to
provide even illumination and true color, so programmers could see
what their creations would look like to others.
RON
JOHNSON
design principal,
Arcturis |
|
“I think indirect lighting is much preferable to direct lighting,”
Egan says. “A lot of people are finally getting around to it.” In
health care, she explains, it makes a huge difference in a patient’s
experience, because it means a patient lying down or on a gurney
doesn’t look directly into a bunch of bright lights.
In open offices, indirect lighting and task lighting usually work
together to give people the light they need for their particular
jobs while simultaneously saving energy.
“In an office, you are looking for an environment that is flexible,
that serves the person using a computer screen, who needs low light
levels, and someone else using paper, who needs high light levels,”
Burkett says. “We try to create light that is very shadow free and
as needed layer on specific task lighting, which may mean pendant
mounted fixtures in one area, or a desk lamp, or lighting a wall.”
Burkett is best known locally for figuring out how to light the
Arch. From his base in St. Louis, he consults on projects across
the country, including the corporate headquarters for Crate & Barrell
and Morgan Stanley Dean Whittier in Chicago. His work on those offices
pushes the edge of what is technologically feasible by combining
indirect lighting in open offices with individual user control.
“Everyone in the office can control the light right in their own
areas of the office without adversely affecting people a few feet
away,” he says. “That kind of individualization of lighting control
is becoming a strong attribute of the most modern office buildings.”
Johnson agrees that, even in an office, “you want different light
levels and types of fixtures for different uses.” At Energizer,
for example, Johnson’s firm, Arcturis, “made light more subdued
and relaxing in the lounge areas, and more consistent in office
areas,” he says.
As for task lighting, not all task lights are equal, he warned.
Different lights perform differently. He lamented that “too often
people make light fixture selections based on what light fixtures
look like rather than how they perform.”
Another mistaken belief is that one light level works for everyone.
“One client we worked with asked what level of lighting they should
have, because they were getting a couple of complaints,” Johnson
says. “I asked where people were and what position they worked in.
There is not one standard of lighting for every person. You have
to look at the whole environment and how someone works.”
The technology for controlling all these lights, with the flexibility
users need, continue to evolve, as well. “The challenge is to orchestrate
lighting a house or bank lobby or shopping mall atrium with just
one or two buttons,” Burkett says. He predicts that by the end of
the decade, Missouri will follow other states in legislating that
lighting controls include motion sensors and daylight cells to control
energy use.
Other regulations eventually coming our way will govern the amount
of ambient light building light systems can produce, according to
Johnson. “California dropped to 1.1 watt per square foot from 1.5.
Here, there are a lot of places that are well over 1.5 watts per
square foot.”
Regulations, Johnson says, are a driving force in the lighting industry.
“At some point, they will change the whole way we look at lighting,”
he says.
Peter Downs is a St. Louis-based free-lance writer. |
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