Can an expensive light fixture save your project money and keep your design intact? Definitely! The key is to trim the cost of labor on the job site, which has skyrocketed over the past decades. That is why progressive contractors are prefabricating wiring and assembling fixtures and controls off site in order to be cost…

I don’t like Daylight Saving Time. There, I said it. I spent the past winter in Southwest Florida. For the first two months, this literally meant “rise and shine,” as the a.m. sunlight would coincide with waking time and the beginning of the work day. Even better, with a dining room that faces west and…

Luminaires are in constant motion at the National Museum in Oslo The definition of “flexible lighting” is typically pretty flexible. Track-mounted fixtures that can be re-aimed, tunable CCT and “future-proof” luminaires that can easily be switched out all fall into the flexible lighting bucket. Now, the design team for The National Museum in Oslo has…

Media immersion, flexible controls and more make waves in museums As a former museum employee who witnessed the start of the pandemic from behind the front desk of a major institution in Manhattan, this LD+A editor wanted to know more about the role of lighting in the chic world of installations on display. Specifically, how…

Specialty-food store Grace in the Kitchen takes its lighting as seriously as its cheese. Resting in the suburb of Kanata in Ontario, Canada, the warehouse-turned-shop is a sophisticated spot to find high-quality meats, cheeses, chocolates, bakeware, knives and all manner of kitchen gadgets for the at-home chef. Ottawa-based Parallel 45 Design Group Ltd. was hired to set…

Stretching our Limits How much square footage do we need to tell a story? By Brienne Musselman A full cycle of educational events has now finished, since we’ve been able to get back to the instinct of gathering. LightFair, IES Annual Conference, IES Street and Area Lighting Conference, IALD Enlighten Americas and LEDucation in the…

Mexican municipality Solidaridad will benefit from a smart streetlighting solution by Signify’s Telensa deployed across an initial 4,000 streetlights—affecting 350,000 residents—in Playa del Carman. Telensa was awarded contract by Traffic Light, the municipality’s urban planning consultancy and contractor, to deliver energy and operational efficiencies to the city, create savings and improve the environmental well-being of…

Landscape Forms, manufacturer of LED lighting, furniture, accessories and more, has become a gold-level sponsor of volunteer-run organization Women in Lighting + Design (WILD). “Landscape Forms seeks to advance and advocate for the involvement of many people and perspectives. Our student sponsorships, such as the Landscape Architect Foundation Ignite college scholarships for Black, Indigenous, and…

Our built environment plays a crucial role in determining the quality of energy we consume. As the nation invests in grid modernization and resiliency, there is a growing emphasis on electrification, renewable energy integration, and carbon reduction. With this, Direct Current (DC) power is key to easily connecting our buildings to renewable resources and energy…

The texture of crystal provided the inspiration for Vermilion Zhou Design Group’s renovation of the Crystal Orange Hotel in Shanghai. Lighting guides guests inside, transforming through different objects and spaces with a goal of releasing visitors from the pressures of the busy outside world. Supporting the motif is an infinity mirror box (pictured) located between…

Light flows in and out of this bike barn on a school campus in Arkansas. A barn that leaks? It seems undesirable, unappealing, untenable. Unless the “leak” is lighting, as is the case at the Thaden School’s Bike Barn in Bentonville, AR, where the whole idea is to “let it flow.”  Used for bike storage, as a well as…

A converted Midwest department store gets a makeover—inside and out. By Michelle Zimmerman "A lot of care has to be taken when renovating a building as iconic and loved as the Dayton’s building,” says Paul Whitaker, principal lighting designer with Schuler Shook. Influential in the history of the indoor American mall and parent company to…

With light trespass pervasive, the unshielded version of this fixture stands out as the main culprit. It’s time for a manufacturing moratorium Recently I spent an invigorating evening on a lighting manufacturer’s roof deck in midtown Manhattan. As libations lubricated immersive conversation, we witnessed a Harvest Moon rise over the Empire State Building. The night…

Using nanoparticles that absorb, store and gradually release light, engineers at MIT have created a new generation of light-emitting plants that can be charged by an LED. After 10 seconds of charging, the plants glow for several minutes, producing light that is 10-times brighter than the first generation of glowing plants the group reported just…

When owner Brandon Hartmann decided to open a new cannabis dispensary in Cobourg, Canada, he wanted the shopping experience to feel organic, highlight local history, and show off, in his own words, “budding feel-good vibes in a feel-good town.” “We created this entire store in honor of Cobourg and there are a lot of cool…