Suzan Tillotson’s lighting design at the Lincoln Center, New York. Photo courtesy Suzan Tillotson Associates.

The work of lighting designer Suzan Tillotson is no doubt quite familiar to Metropolis readers. She collaborated with Rem Koolhaas, Josh Prince-Ramis, Petra Blaisse and the designers of OMA on the now seminal Seattle Central Library. She worked with Diller Scofidio + Renfro on the School of American Ballet, at Lincoln Center, and teamed with SANNA on the New Museum of Contemporary Art, in New York. Recently Barbara Eldredge spoke to her for our Leading Luminaries story. An edited version of their conversation follows. –Martin C. Pedersen

A while back Metropolis identified day lighting as the next big thing in the field. What is today’s next big thing?

It’s definitely LEDs and organic LEDs. I’ve just seen some promising lighting packages. Really small assemblies, with low wattage that can flood a whole ceiling with light.

Tell me a little more about organic LEDs.

I saw the first usable one at Light Fair in Philly last spring and to be honest with you I’ve been trying to use it ever since. It’s very difficult because I haven’t been able to get it on a job. The photometry has been slow. We’ve got it now, but we’re waiting for pricing. It’s not cost effective yet. It’s more expensive than the typical LED but it’s has a lot of promise.

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About seven years ago James Benya, the Portland, Oregon-based lighting designer, introduced us to daylighting. Much to his chagrin, daylighting subsequently became one of the most popular and most commonly misapplied green building strategies. When we decided to interview leading lighting designers for our Leading Luminaries story, we knew the outspoken Benya would be one of our subjects. An edited version of his conversation with Derrick Mead follows.
–Martin C. Pedersen

About five years ago, you helped us identify daylighting as the next big thing in the field. What’s happening now?

More and more, we’re seeing every project come in with LEED aspirations. People are looking into daylighting. I got a call yesterday from a professor at the University of Texas Austin School of Architecture, who wanted me to give him a serious set of daylighting examples. I said, “OK, but you’ve got to understand, I’m not going to give you bad examples that have been spun into good ones. I’m going to give you projects that are simple, work fine, but may not be glamorous.” People in architecture and engineering tend to over glamorize projects, because of their aesthetics, and sweep the concerns surrounding energy efficiency and daylighting under the rug. I said, “These are genuine projects, but you’re not necessarily going to see a lot of them published. They’re everyday jobs.” We’re not going to fix energy problems in the world by turning edifice projects green with a whole of money and greenwashing. It’s going to be the other 10,000 projects where we’re going to make the biggest difference.

You’ve been critical of a lot high profile projects that have used daylighting. Why?

Because you’ve got to get the window-to-wall ratio down to a practical percentage. Take the New York Times Building. Here’s an overglazed building, where it’s very difficult for people to work near the windows, because there’s so much light. In order to control it, they had to put in shades, which defeats the purpose of the daylight. The Aria hotel, in Las Vegas, has an almost 100% window-wall ratio, with many of the facades facing the sun. And that’s in the desert! Not a good idea. Of course they employed fritting and other technologies to reduce the impact, but the fact of the matter is you can’t have that much glass without having thermal gain problems. You can underglaze a building, in which case not much happens. It’s an insulated box. But you can overglaze a building, so any savings you achieve by turning off lights are more than eaten up by the solar gain. There is a balance or plateau in most projects, where you can make tradeoffs. But that plateau has a rather limited range. It’s between 25 and 40 percent window-to-wall ratio. At 25 percent you get less daylight but better insulation; at 40 percent you get more daylight but less insulation. They’re both reasonable tradeoffs. You go to a 100% window to wall ratio, and you’re in trouble. That message doesn’t really get out. We’ve got to encourage the community to seek that technical balance. You must design buildings from the ground up with that balance being part of the thinking. It can’t be something that someone tries to fix or fit into the project after the architecture is determined. The New York Times building is a great example, I think, where specific architecture was determined, and they brought in a daylighting expert to try to make it work. In that regard, it’s not a very good building.

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For our Leading Luminaries story, Barbara Eldredge and Derrick Mead interviewed eight of our top lighting designers. To create the article that appeared in our December issue, we pulled together all of their interviews and edited them into a group conversation. I think it represents a kind of state-of-the-union for the discipline. The following is an edited version of Eldredge’s lively conversation with Hervé Descottes, the founder of L’Observatoire International. –Martin C. Pedersen

About five years ago, we identified day lighting as the next big thing in the field. So what’ today’s next big thing?

It’s LESS. (laughs)

Less?

Less is definitely a lot more.

What do you mean?

Less color, less uniformity. Be more customized. It’s about precision. I think lighting hasn’t been very precise. It’s been a lot about quantity and light level and making lots of surfaces of light and using the technology at the maximum of the extravagance of the technology.

So it’s about subtlety and form?

Yes. And it’s about time! It’s about time the lighting designer gets the place they deserve.

Do you think that lighting designers have been under-acclaimed?

No. Over-acclaimed.

You think so?

Absolutely. I think every lighting designer thinks they are much more important than they are. Many lighting designers think they’re the architects. I think its good with this recession that everyone is little bit more appropriate in their roles. Design is a team sport. Everybody has an important role. And I think for a long time lighting designers got so excited by this technology construct that they give themselves a little bit more importance than they really were in the course of the project. Lighting is important, but so is subtlety, refinement , and respect for the architecture . Thinking that we’re artists when we’re only lighting designers is not important.

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Jennifer Tipton’s lighting design for “Spectral Scriabin” at the Lincoln Center in November 2011. Photo: Ruby Washington/The New York Times

If you talk to lighting designers about new technology—as we did recently—it’s hard not to conclude that the incandescent bulb is headed for almost certain extinction. The reasons seem obvious: LEDs are a lot more energy efficient and much (much) longer lasting. What’s not to like? Well, for now, price. But once economics of scale are achieved and the cost of LEDs come down, then it’s simply a matter of time before the incandescent—at one time, a radical breakthrough in its own right—shuffles off into obsolescence.  And that has Jennifer Tipton, the legendary theatrical lighting designer, worried:

“My biggest concern is that the incandescent lamp will completely disappear, and with it the spectrum that it brings,” she told our Barbara Eldredge recently. “This means that all of the color that has been devised over my lifetime will no longer be the color that my eye recognizes. LEDs are great—they add to the toolbox. But if you look at the spectrum of an LED and the spectrum of an incandescent, they’re just fundamentally different. LEDs don’t produce that warm candlelight glow of the incandescent bulb at a low reading. Unfortunately, this has happened throughout the history of lighting. Each new lamp has been colder than the one before it. Lighting today is very, very cold, tilting almost to the inhuman. So I guess I’m old fashioned, like the people who complained about missing the glow of gaslights when electricity came in. But I do feel very strongly that the toolbox should be complete, and that you shouldn’t entirely give up one thing just to have another.”

Lighting for the Yale Repertory Theater’s recently-produced ‘Autumn Sonata’, designed by Jennifer Tipton. Photo: T. Charles Erickson/Yale Repertory Theatre

Related: In Leading Luminaries, we spoke to seven of our top lighting designers about new tools, new technologies, new challenges, and the way forward.

Jennifer Tipton is an award-winning lighting designer, internationally renowned for redefining the relationship between lighting and performance. She has collaborated for five decades with a veritable who’s who of the stage, with such companies as the New York City Ballet, the American Ballet Theatre, Twyla Tharp Dance, and the Paul Taylor Dance Company, and venues such as the Metropolitan Opera. Tipton has won two Tony awards, two Drama desk awards, and was awarded The Dorothy and Lilian Gish Prize. Since 1991, she has served as an adjunct professor of lighting design at the Yale University School of Drama. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2008.

Even with the necessary emphasis on LED technology and efficient materials, many lighting designers can’t resist experimenting with products that are just, for lack of a better word, cool. While strict functionalists may cringe, I admire this vein of creative conceptual design, in the tradition of Isamu Noguchi’s sculptural Akari lamps. Last week saw the debut of three new lighting designs that are similarly imaginative and playful, blurring the lines between lamp and objet d’art.

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A criticism frequently heard at recent furniture expos, from Milan to New York, was the absence of real product innovation. The bad economy has something to do with this shortage: During the past few years many manufacturers have used restraint, showing few new products, trotting out previous years’ introductions.

Still, there were a few surprises. One of them was the first-ever presence of Minnesota-based 3M, sandwiched in between bathroom faucets and textile stands at ICFF in a shiny, large-scale booth that seemed to say little more than, “We’re here!”. A Midwestern approach to attention-grabbing?  At closer inspection I found one of the most interesting offerings, no larger than an iPad: a new way to light up a building using sunlight – sans skylights or photovoltaic transfer.

“Sunlight Delivery System,” 3M’s daylighting solution, uses one of the company’s noteworthy inventions, a highly reflective film, familiar to users of LCD screens and smart phones. This luminous film brings sunlight inside a building through galvanized steel ducts connected to a rooftop catchall. Read more…

Photo: Paul Clemence.

A chair could change a century and perhaps a planet. It will have to, eventually, but the greening of the home-furnishings industry is taking longer than we hoped for. Though we see evidence of one or two singular aspects of sustainability, systems-thinking is harder to find when it comes to residential furniture design and manufacturing.

Asked for an honest assessment of the “State of Green and Sustainability” at New York trade show, ICFF, (International Contemporary Furniture Fair), we traipsed through three very-cool satellite showrooms, one high-end showroom, and the whole ICFF show floor (at the Javits Center) before we finally heard smart talk from a visionary manufacturer. Someone is doing their homework and we loved hearing words like “biocide release, change of custody in the supply chain and resource conservation.” But much more homework needs to be done throughout the industry. Herewith is our first Report Card and highlights of the green and sustainable trends from ICFF 2011 as well as galleries, shops, and showrooms around New York City. Read more…

When I heard that Rosalyn Cama, principal of the New Haven firm, CAMA, Inc., was about to speak at Lightfair (Philadelphia, May 17-19) I jumped at the chance to engage her in conversation about the relationship of light and health.  My motivation was strictly personal. I’ve spent enough time in hospitals, both as a patient and frequent visitor, to know the dismal conditions in these sealed, dank, germ-ridden buildings where you go to get cured of what ails you, and can come away with some bug or another. And as someone who spends too much time staring at computer screens in darkened rooms and whose every cell is screaming for sunlight and fresh air, I, personally wanted to take advantage of Ros’ special learning as an interior designer, researcher, and consultant in the healthcare field (she is the author of Evidence-Based Healthcare Design, John Wiley & Sons, 2009).  Hospitals, as I see them, are the extreme environments of our times. If we solve some of our health, safety, and welfare problems in these places we can begin to understand what it takes to design all kinds of healthy interiors. Here Ros talks about why lighting design is key to human health.

The lobby of the Dublin Methodist Hospital project (Karlsberger/CAMA).

Susan S. Szenasy:  I’m happy to hear that you, a specialist in healthcare design and healing environments, will be speaking at Lightfair on May 18th. Firstly, as a long-time advocate of Evidence Based Design, can you explain what that term means to you?

Rosalyn Cama: Evidence-Based Design (EBD) is the process of basing decisions about the built environment on credible research to achieve the best possible outcomes.  This process gathers intelligence from a variety of sources, maps a project’s vision, hypothesizes optimal outcomes, and measures results.  It keeps the design team on track for the best solution derived from baseline data and easily opens possibilities for innovative next solutions. Read more…

Since we posted the December 2010 issue last month, our cover story on New York City’s landmarked interiors hit the charts (Most Shared Stories in web language) consistently. And no wonder. These memorable spaces add the kind of rich experience to being in New York that the iconic buildings crowding our skyline can only promise. These rooms deliver an aesthetic trip back in time, a trip that makes a visit here a truly memorable time. Though these theatres, lobbies, restaurants, and stores are public spaces where you can marvel at the detailing—its richness, its restraint, its exquisite sense of proportion, its materials—photographers have a hard time setting up their tripods in them. Access is grudgingly granted or often denied.  Obstacles can be daunting. This is the story of one such adventure.

Documenting this crop of landmarked interiors (including the Cunard Building, Film Center, Brooklyn Historical Society, Time & Life Building, Charles Scribner’s Sons Building) fell to photographer Sean Hemmerle. The tight deadline added to the degree of difficulty. As he tells it, it takes a village (in our case our editorial and art staff) to pull off such an assignment. So I asked Sean to find a comfy chair in his downtown studio, and talk into my Flip camera about photographing the Beacon Theatre, which ended up on our cover. He’s currently updating his website http://seanhemmerle.com/  where you’ll find full documentation of the shoot as well as his other shoots from the world over.  But for now, take a look at the image he took inside the Beacon, lit by only one light bulb, then compare this to what his camera captured when the lights were—seemingly miraculously—turned on.

 
The Beacon Theatre, lit by one lone bulb.

The Lumenhaus in Chicago.

VirginiaTech’s Lumenhaus – the solar-powered house that won the International Solar Decathlon in June 2010 – is now biding its time in a cornfield. Before you think that’s a step down from the South Promenade of Chicago’s Millenium Park – where it was proudly displayed in conjunction with the GreenBuild Convention in November – you should know that the cornfield is on the grounds of Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois.

The Lumenhaus is the cutting edge of sustainable home design, using several advanced systems to generate and conserve energy. But as its name suggests, the basis of its design concept is the optimal use of light. The Farnsworth House was in fact its architectural inspiration, providing the template of the glass pavilion – facades that are open to the landscape, with the utilities collected at the core. Read more…