“How can our lighting reinforce the architect’s vision?”

“The Kelly Principles”: Why did they stood the test of time? How does the translation of the three principles to modern technology look like? How does this concept resonate in your work?
I think that the terms my father used to describe effects of lighting have stayed relevant is because of the poetry. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. But in this case, the words he used are so vivid that once you’ve heard them, the image created in your mind is indelible. And I think that we all need that poetry; a lot of what we do is so focused on engineering, on data, that it’s a relief to stop and think about why we do what we do.

How has sustainability influenced lighting design approaches today and what future topics do you see? What responsibility do you see on manufacturers side and on the lighting designers side?
The focus on sustainability has certainly increased in recent years, and a good thing it is, too. When I started in the lighting profession in the early 80’s, I don’t remember giving a thought about what was going to happen to the lamps after they were burned out. At that time, electrical energy was relatively cheap and plentiful. I remember we used to be able to specify decorative lighting – with incandescent lamps! - in addition to functional lighting in many spaces. By the early 90’s, that decorative lighting that did not provide functional light would be cut from the budget.
As far as the responsibility for progress in development goes, I’ve always seen it as a partnership between the manufacturer and the designer, with ample help from the committees which set guidelines, the governments which set standards, the utility which can provide rebates and other programs to boost energy efficiency, and the clients who bring their own needs to the table. Within that circle, I think that lighting designers have the least influence to begin with. We can collect the data and hopefully make the best choices for our clients, but we rarely have the time or the fees to take a leadership role.

With the rise of smart lighting and automation, how do you see the role of designers shifting?
Remember that when I first started, our sources were limited to incandescent, halogen-incandescent, linear fluorescents, and HID lamps for outdoor use only. Of those, only the incandescents and halogens could be easily dimmed. Fluorescents could be dimmed but the dimming ballasts were an expensive option, sometimes doubling the price of the fittings. And the control systems were bulky and complicated. Even multi-location dimming was very difficult at the time. Now LEDs allow us to have everything dim, and if you can use simple 0-10V dimming it’s basically as cheap as switching, without a high cost adder. That’s what allows the much more sophisticated control systems we use today. And because LEDs are inherently low-power, we can take advantage of wireless technology which would have been nearly impossible with standard sources. The push toward automation probably came from outside the lighting world; we didn’t drive IoT, for example. But we have certainly benefitted from the developing technologies.

Back in the Dark Ages when I started, the lighting designers would be hired to layout the RCPs and select the fittings- and sometimes to design custom or modified fittings. We did create a control intent schedule showing our preferred lighting zones, but for the most part we weren’t responsible for the technical side of anything. That was all the responsibility of the electrical engineers. In fact, I remember that from my father’s time up into my own, there was a kind of turf war between the engineers and the designers. The engineers saw us as taking away from their sphere of influence and therefore potentially cutting into their fees. It was until the coming of newer sources (MR-16s: ELV or MLV? CFLs: 2-pin or 4-pin? dimmable or not?) that the fitting specifications became more technical. At a certain point, the electrical engineers ceded ground. It was tremendous amount of work to follow through on the compatibility of the sources and the auxiliary equipment. And when the LEDs arrived, it got even worse for a while. Constant current or constant voltage? What type of driver with what type of light engine and what type of control? Now that we have UNV and tri-phase drivers, a lot of that went away. And on very complex projects, I can hand off the technical design to systems integrators, as we used to do with the electrical engineers.

Which current lighting technologies excite you the most?
I’m very excited about the opportunities offered by color-changing technology. In large-scale retail and hospitality, it gives us the chance to play with dynamic color, and integration with video and sound systems, which is cool.

But in residential and healthcare, educational and office projects, it gives us a chance to think about human-centric lighting in ways we could not have done before. We can easily choose tuneable-white sources and think about how the light integrates with daylight, or how to supply sufficient blue-light or limit it over the course of a day. I think the manufacturers have gotten it nailed down. The weak link in the chain is how the lighting manufacturers and the control systems manufacturers don’t seem to talk to each other.

What do you think the future of architectural lighting design looks like?
As it happens, I’m getting set to begin a very large-scale mixed-use development whose key design goals are to be future-forward and to maximize sustainability. I’m very excited about it. Since we’re still in the blue-sky phase, I’m thinking about how we can maximize today’s technology but design in a modular way to allow for the integration of future technology as it comes along. Biophilic lighting elements? Immersive lighting? 3D printed materials?

If your father were alive today, what do you think he would be most surprised – or pleased – to see in today’s building environment?
I’ve thought about this a lot in the last few years. A lot of us were concerned about LED lighting in the early days: there were some early adopters which had horrific color, and tremendous glare. We’ve come a long way from then. We now have a very flexible, adaptable source which has been a vast improvement over older technologies. Would be ever want to go back to compact fluorescents? I think my father would have been on board with all of it.

Throughout his life, my father was always curious. He was interested in everything, attending lectures and reading about art, design, nature, poetry, and engineering. He was educated as an architect, and I think he would have been astonished and fascinated by amorphous architecture most of all.
I also think he would be blown away by the difference in speed of the design process itself. Remember that in his time, drawings were physical objects which had to be sent from one place to another. Before Fedex and DHL, this could take weeks, especially on an international project. All the major project decision were done during face-to-face meetings; all the project documentation was done on paper and sent by mail. No faxes existed, let alone Zoom meetings! The downside to the way we do it today is that we have less time to think.

Richard Kelly

The U.S. American Richard Kelly (1919–1977) was a pioneer of qualitative lighting design, combining facets of perception psychology and stage lighting to create a single concept. Kelly replaced the issue of light quantity with the approach of qualities of light. In his profession as a lighting designer he worked on important buildings such as the Glass House (Philip Johnson), the Seagram Building (Mies van der Rohe) and the Kimbell Art Museum (Louis I. Kahn).

10 years after ERCO switched its products to 100% LED: What was in your opinion the biggest impact of solid state lighting technology on architectural lighting design, respective on your personal design approach?
I remember when ERCO made that switch. I was shocked – it seemed so risky at the time to commit to a new source. Now of course, it turned out to be incredibly forward-thinking. Solid-state sources have allowed us to put lights where they would never have fit before, with a choice of beamspreads and colors that we never had before. We can use point sources that really are points. We can have luminous ceilings that are not only energy efficient but require inches of space between the source and the diffusing material, rather than the huge cavities of the old laylights. We can have them change color subtly over the day or project moving images. We don’t need to worry about clunky emergency lights in the ceiling, because whole rooms can put on an emergency invertor.
On some projects, we can use PoE to take advantage of low-voltage wiring systems, for example in a data center. We can specify low-glare optics on exterior fittings without adding external shrouds and lens. The list goes on.

But fundamentally, I think that lighting designers approach their work the same way my father did: what do we want to see here? How can our lighting reinforce the architect’s vision? What mood or emotion do we want to evoke? How can this lighting delight the senses? Where’s the poetry?