By Zane Wylie, Sales Representative, Raylinc Lighting
Bring lighting in while the architect is still shaping the building. Once the walls and ceilings are fixed, the lighting can only go where the building has left room for it.
Zane Wylie uses a simple example. A room with four walls and a finished ceiling leaves one real option: fittings in the ceiling.
Now picture the same room with a coffer, a recess built into the ceiling at the corner. The fitting hides inside it and throws a glow across the surface around it. “You’re not seeing the fitting, you’re seeing the effect of the light,” Zane says.
That coffer is best designed into the building from the start, well before the ceiling goes in. When lighting is part of the early conversation, the building can be designed with an eye to how it will be lit.
Architects often share renders of how they want a space to look. “It’s basically a cartoon,” Zane says. “The lighting is magic.” Every surface is evenly lit, with no sign of where the light comes from.
The questions start when someone has to build it. How does light get onto the ceiling? How does it reach the walls? Where do the fittings go? If every fitting sits in the ceiling, the ceiling itself stays dark, and the room won’t look like the render.
Zane changes the conversation depending on who he’s talking to.
Zane includes a simple render with most of his designs. A plan is flat. A render shows the shape of each room and how light fills it.
An engineer reads the minimum, maximum and average light levels. An architect, or anyone less technical, reads the picture. “Pictures speak a thousand words,” Zane says.
These renders show walls, ceiling and floor, with the occasional boardroom table. They are a lighting tool, built to show light distribution rather than furniture and finishes.
Some jobs need one design and no changes. Others pass through many hands. The engineer meets the architect, they rethink an area, and the design goes round again. “There’s a lot of different ways to skin the cat,” Zane says.
Cost drives revisions too. One option uses fewer, dearer fittings and another uses more, cheaper ones. Months later, a project may hit cost blowouts in the concrete. Lighting comes late in the build, so it is often where the savings get found.
“Ideally it doesn’t get out to revision 105,” Zane says, “but occasionally it does.”
As early as possible, while the architect is still designing the building. Early input allows details such as ceiling coffers that hide fittings and light surfaces directly.
A recess built into the ceiling that conceals the light fitting. You see the glow of light across the surface around it, and the fitting stays out of sight.
Renders often show even light on every surface without showing where it comes from. Real fittings need somewhere to go, and that decides which surfaces get lit.
Zane includes a simple render with most designs, so engineers, architects and clients can see how light fills the space.
Zane Wylie is a sales representative at Raylinc Lighting, working with engineers in Townsville, Cairns and Brisbane. He holds a Graduate Certificate in Lighting and is a member of the Illuminating Engineering Society.
Contact the Raylinc team to bring lighting into your next project at concept stage.