INTRODUCTION

As technology has transformed lighting design profoundly over the past several years, the fundamental effect lighting has on our built and natural environment has remained constant. Lighting is the medium that helps shape our environments by providing not only illumination, but also the inherent ability to affect our mood and evoke emotion within our daily lives. From the subtle glow of a candlelit dinner to a dramatically lit ancient treasure in a museum, light influences our perception of the environ ment and attitude toward the spaces we inhabit.

Lighting design plays an integral part of the design process on many levels. Over the years, AWA Lighting Designers has been an essential part of that creative process, and one of the most unique firms to work within the industry. Their understanding of light as an art form that can be sculpted through shadow and nuance, rather than simply a utility, is why their collaboration on projects has made such an impact. Their use of technology as part of the design process has

INTRODUCTION by Shawn Basler

also helped numerous design teams to both visualize the effects of lighting on space and research the effects on the human psyche. All of this has had a profound impact on the quality of design and the ambience of the places we create as designers.

The future of lighting design will continue to push the boundaries of technology in both the design process as well as the built environment. The last decade has brought the most significant leap in lighting technology and design tools. We now can study the effects of lighting quality on space in real time and understand the impact on the environment. This becomes increasingly important in analyzing the impact of lighting design on our health and wellness, as well as sustainability. While new tools allow designers to quickly study lighting and technology may allow end-users to customize their experiences, the ability to choreograph this dance in design har mony will be led by those who approach lighting design as an art form. AWA remains one of those firms at the forefront leading this paradigm shift in the industry.

The essays and projects on the following pages represent a culmination of more than 20 years of thinking and practice in the field of lighting de sign by AWA. The preface, “The Paradigm Shift and Our Zeitgeist,” addresses the notion that the technology shift in lighting design has altered how we experience light within our built environments by seeking to understand the spirit of our times and how we can contribute as professionals. Our ability to use light as part of our built environment by transforming spaces through color, texture, and shape allows us to think of light as a physical medium. AWA Lighting Designers embodies this spirit in each of their projects by exploring the climate, culture, and materiality of each project, and pushing the boundaries of how the physical medium of light can enhance the user experience and impact how we see our world. Through their work, we can begin to un derstand the meaning of our zeitgeist.

about Shawn Basler, AIA, NCARB

Shawn Basler leads Perkins Eastman as a part of the 3-person Co-CEO leadership team. Responsible for fostering the firm’s national and international growth, Shawn is a leader in the design of globally-recognized architecture and planning projects. With more than 20 years experience, his repertoire ranges from hotels and resorts, office buildings, and residential developments to industrial and commercial planning projects located throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Shawn collaborates closely with his clients to lead projects from concept through completion. He stays intimately involved in all aspects of the design process from planning and programming through technical design and construction, providing continuous oversight to meet clients’ goals. Shawn is a member of the American Planning Association and on the Professional Advisory Board of Kansas State University’s College of Architecture, Planning & Design.

THE PARADIGM SHIFT & OUR ZEITGEIST

“Our interactions with light are changing due to changing lighting (and controls) technologies, new choice of materials, a growing awareness of the latent properties of light for health and wellness, and new legislative policies.”

THE PARADIGM SHIFT & OUR ZEITGEIST

The profession of lighting design has morphed over the past 20 to 30 years to become almost unrecognizable for many practitioners. Our journey over the past 2 decades has seen some exciting times — architecturally, economically, and with new lighting technology inundating our professional existence.

We, at AWA, have spent a great deal of time researching light design in all its forms. As a professional firm in the industry, we attempt to embed our beliefs and theories into our work and hope that our efforts stand as justification for our arguments and critique of the zeitgeist of light. In the subsequent chapters, we have selected some of our works that we believe best display our efforts in order to manifest our thoughts surrounding lighting. Along with a detailed description of each project is a statement of how we believe that design meets the client’s needs, as well as how the design performs in accordance with our beliefs on lighting.

We started speaking of this impending change in the early 2000s when we boldly stated at a conference that the way lighting design was being practiced would be extinct by 2020 and many of us would have to find new jobs or professions. No one was interested in the drastic change anticipated then, which challenged their comfort zones. Most of our deliverables were being replaced by software. As we get closer to 2020, all of these predictions are becoming stark realities for the lighting and design industries at large. Disruptive growth of the industry was bound to happen and the ever-present question for many of us is “How do we stay relevant?” What can we do as design professionals to still contribute to our zeitgeist? In order to contribute, we have to first understand what the zeitgeist is and then understand the changes the era is bringing and the new paradigms that are being created due to the changes.

“The wheel is almost coming full circle, turning away from mass manufacturing and toward individualized production.”

“We define light as an overarching consideration of the visual sense as it is informed by our culture, climate, and materiality.”

Our interactions with light are changing due to changing lighting (and controls) technologies; new choice of materials, a growing awareness of the latent properties of light for health and wellness, and new legislative policies. Technologies inevitably were going to change. Furthermore, supply cycles are changing and installation practices have become strikingly modular. Devices that use cameras or accelerometers to sense movements, such as Microsoft’s Kinect and Nintendo’s Wii, demonstrate that gestures can be a useful, powerful, and fun way to control a computer. However, these kinds of controls are rapidly entering the architectural design and lighting world due to the rapid cross-pollination between different manufacturing sectors.

Light exists in our zeitgeist as a medium by which we receive different forms of information, but it exists more explicitly through its capacity to help us to see. However, light possesses a broader contextualization. Light informs the mood and our attitudes toward both spaces and people. We seek to form a critique of the zeitgeist in this manner as we determine that there are not separate manifestations of light, but rather simply “light” and its forms. We critique this zeitgeist further by determining light as broader than its different forms or own interpretations of its capacity; we define light as an overarching consideration of the visual sense as it is informed by our culture, climate, and materiality. Like pixels, light is a physical embodiment. Pixels can be controlled and manipulated to form patterns, which we interpret as text or imagery, not merely through our conditioned response to familiar patterns but also through philosophical and theoretical perspectives. This is true of light as well. In understanding this, it is clear that the focus of the zeitgeist of light is of light as a thing, in whatever technological form it may be manifest.

Our experience of the quotidian is informed by the senses; through our ability to see, hear, feel, taste, and touch. We live in a world dominated by aesthetic concerns and preferences as we seek to find comfort for our bodies and minds. How do we begin to determine our own capacities for change in order to adapt to our envi-

ronment? Here we arrive at a discussion about design and its ability to inform how we want to live. Design is not only a tool that we can use to manifest concepts and thoughts, but also one that allows us to sculpt our existence. Light is what forms our ability to see; its dispersions and levels determine how we interpret the content we see. Though opinions may vary, it is hard to argue that through our aesthetical concerns we do not perceive what we see to be of great value to us and our comfort. This is not to say that we do not value the aesthetics of sound in a beautiful opera; that of taste in a delicious meal; that of smell in a posy of fresh flowers, or that of touch in a warm caress, but we do, first, sense through sight. The power of our first visual impressions is extreme— it is said humans determine attraction in less than a second. How then are we to condition our sense of sight? To do that we must first not question what we see, but how we see. What we see is not the matter we form with our hands or the pixels we shape through our technology, but rather frequencies of light. When we generally speak of visual aesthetics we do not discuss methods of forming content, but how light affects our capacity to see.

The emergence of the tiny, long-lasting, inexpensive LEDs is dramatically changing the lighting situations. Presently, it is predicted that Solid State Lighting (SSL) will comprise 75% of the global lighting market. Lack of standards for many components of the LED package and the reliability of the LED package will impact future growth. The wheel is almost coming full circle, turning away from mass manufacturing and toward individualized production. LED lighting systems will be affected by modularity, software, manufacturing processes, lamps, reflectors, finishes, and environmental factors. Previously, people relied more on natural light and on planning activities during times when it was available. In the last 100 years, as other areas of the world have found prosperity and technology has become more affordable, traditional constructs of light and darkness have been replaced by grossly over-lit spaces. The critique here is clear— technology should not be implemented carte blanche only because it is affordable and easy to install. All technology is susceptible to environmental concerns and, although LEDs do provide superior lighting efficiency in terms of energy, the rate of production required to fill the glut of over-lit lighting aesthetics is not environmentally sustainable. The reality of the industry is that we have an uncertain supply of both energy and materials, which should be addressed not through techno-solving, but rather through simple ethical implementation into the design process, which starts with the simple question, “do we really need this?”

We hope that, as you turn through our work, you will be inspired to draw your own conclusions about the existing zeitgeist of light and will determine whether we have lived up to the standards that we have set for ourselves. We acknowledge that the license to critique a given system or set of beliefs is granted by being open to a critique of oneself and that in being open to that critique we challenge others to reform as we do. This is what we strive for— a new zeitgeist within the lighting design industry that will continue to develop for years to come. And it starts here.