Top Woman In Design and Construction

A Special Annual Edition from Sokol Media, Inc.

FALL 2013

TOP WOMAN IN Design and Construction

PHOTO BY JILLPHOTOGRAPHY.COM

Susannah Zweighaft AKF GROUP

TOP WOMAN IN DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION 2013

“Susannah brings passion, commitment and leadership to the design process which makes her a vital member of the team.” ­­— Jessica Stebbins Associate Principal, Perkins + Will

AKF’s

Susannah Zweighaft

Lighting the World

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As the only female partner at AKF, an award winning global engineering firm specializing in mechanical and electrical engineering for the built environment, Susannah Zweighaft is quick to point out that her career success is based upon a realization she had at the early age of 15. “I knew even then I would be in the lighting field,” she recalls. Today, 30 years later, she can lay claim to being the lead designer on 160 5thprojects Avenue and, for the past 10 over 750 >lighting years, the Director of AKF Lighting Design, a

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division she successfully launched.

Managing a variety of engineering projects throughout each of AKF’s 10 offices, Susannah is able to blend creativity with practicality.

This is no more apparent than in the success of some of her more notable and recent projects including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, OFS Brands Showroom, General Electric Real Estate, and the ‘Monument to the Struggle Against Terrorism’.

TOP WOMAN IN DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION 2013

Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, Boston, MA

SRH therapy pool

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY Although the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in NYC is an international icon, both for its Frank Lloyd Wright-designed architecture and its renowned art collection, the existing “house” lighting was not energy efficient and not dimmable. Further, since the museum has landmark status for both its exterior and interior, the lighting and controls specified in the replacement project had to be “designed to be virtually invisible, “ Susannah says. After a careful review of all lighting replacement sources, fluorescent became the only viable option to satisfy mounting locations, wattage and budget constraints. Within a window of only 17 days between exhibits, the construction of this project had to be done carefully, but quickly.

The tracks and mono-point heads that dot the ceilings throughout the Rotunda, as well as all the laylights, are now dimmable, thanks to the inclusion of a sophisticated Lutron Dimming system. The Rotunda will be completed in June, and the other tower floors will soon follow. “This new lighting solution has thus far drastically reduced energy consumption in the first completed tower floor,” Susannah says, “and we look forward to producing the same results throughout.”

Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, Charlestown Navy Yard, Boston, MA For this new building that was built on a brown development site, Susannah’s lighting design team provided state of the art interior and exterior lighting solutions that were designed to allow maximum healing for patients and visitors. This 350,000 sf new rehabilitation hospital achieved LEED® Gold accreditation, and included Dark Sky initiatives and Light Pollution constraints. The degree of elegant but cost conscious lighting design solutions has seldom been experienced in other healthcare environments.

The building and exterior/site lighting was designed to meet or exceed local utility company lighting power density allowable levels, a daylighting system was installed, and all available technologies were considered. Further, wherever possible, the project had to work within Partners Healthcare’s specific lighting criteria. “Partners Healthcare had a very strict budget and lighting criteria,” Susannah says. “But everyone acted as a team to get it all done for its opening in April of this year.”

SRH, conference room

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TOP WOMAN IN DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION 2013

OFS Brands Showroom, New York, NY For this project, “everything had to be movable in a very simple and clean way,” Susannah says. “The entire floor has to be reconfigurable, as a furniture showroom, and the lighting has to be easily moved along with it.” Providing lighting design services for this 10,000 sf showroom, which displays the latest in open office design, Susannah’s team created a flexible lighting solution with movable fixtures that support the ever-changing nature of the showroom. All luminaires are movable and amiable, which means that all fixtures, including the cove-mounted luminaires, may be relocated as necessary without an electrician being present. As such, the project was also designed to achieve LEED Silver Accreditation.

General Electric Real Estate, Norwalk, CT The real estate division of General Electric planned a new corporate division headquarters to consolidate its operations into a single location, and AKF was retained to provide MEP/ FP, Lighting Design, Information Technology, and Commissioning services for this project. . With three floors totaling 150,000 sf, the space included 326 private offices, 130 open workstations and support areas, as well as a board room, deal room, conference rooms, and training rooms with state-ofthe-art audio visual and teleconferencing capabilities.

With a sustainable goal of achieving LEED-CI certification. Susannah created a lighting design based on the premise of “shared light”, with specific areas providing light to their adjacent spaces, thus limiting the wattage and energy consumption and leaving the architecture with a “clean” ceiling design. “We used mostly LED’s throughout,” Susannah says.

“It was so successful that it won an award from the Illuminating Engineering Society.”

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Top Left: OFS Brands Showroom open office area; Top Right: OFS Brands main entrance; Center Left: OFS Brands lounge; Center: General Electric Real Estate pantry/common area; Center Right: GE Real Estate conference center; Bottom: Typical office floor of GE Real Estate

TOP WOMAN IN DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION 2013

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TOP WOMAN IN DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION 2013

AKF Lighting Design provides the following services: • Interior and Exterior Lighting Design • Conceptual Development and Consultation • Fixture Layout • Fixture/Lamp Specification • Computer Generated Renderings and Three-Dimensional • Computerized Visualizations • LEED Certification Design/ Calculations • Energy Code Compliance Calculations/COMcheck Lighting the stainless steel tear of the ‘Monument to the Struggle Against Terrorism’

‘Monument to the Struggle Against Terrorism’, Bayonne, NJ “Although this monument rose 200 feet high, we were only given a limited diameter for the lighting,” Susannah recalls. The Monument, which was a gift from President Putin and the people of Russia in tribute to the lives lost during the World Trade Center attacks, was to stand in Bayonne, New Jersey, but be made visible from the harbor. This task presented political, aesthetic and technical challenges, as mounting locations were limited by the artist, by the New Jersey Parks Department and by the civil engineers, who all felt that the lighting must not interfere with their vision of the new park as a whole.

Keeping these conflicting demands in mind, AKF Lighting Design chose to use High Pressure Sodium lamps for the grazing itself and to highlight the stainless silver tear hanging in the monument’s center using Metal Halide lamps. The goal was to take advantage of the different materials and textures and use the characteristics of the materials themselves to dramatize the imagery provided by the artist. The carved names in the black granite base are lighted from in-ground metal halide drive-over fixtures surrounding the base.

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• Remedial Design/Retrofit Solutions • Energy Modeling for Lighting Related ROI • Emergency Lighting Layout & Calculations • Budget Estimates • Control System Design: Dimming, Switching, Daylighting • Mock-up support • Peer Review

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Each of these projects, among many others Susannah has managed, represent a variety of the creative lighting solutions she has provided to her clients, both aesthetical and gracefully. “But, even more than that,” she says “they demonstrate the importance of lighting in enhancing the design environment.”