Exterior architectural lighting must compliment natural and architectural aesthetics with luminaires whose fixture designs reflect the geometric themes and subtle nuances of surrounding structures and landscapes. These luminaires must also operate with optimal efficiency and provide the same level of quality that purely functional site lighting fixtures and general lamping options deliver. It is important for your clients to realize from the inception of the consultation process that exterior architectural lights must anticipate stringent lighting control laws now taking effect across the nation. New LPW requirements, light pollution restrictions, and limitations on the actual lamps that can be used are becoming increasingly. What you propose to your client today must be able to withstand not only the forces of nature and time, but also the forces of change and legislation within human infrastructure and society. Creating an exterior architectural lighting system that is customized to the exact parameters of your client’s site with minimal maintenance, upgrades, and replacements is something we specialize in helping you do.
Exterior architectural lighting must compliment natural and architectural aesthetics with luminaires whose fixture designs reflect the geometric themes and subtle nuances of surrounding structures and landscapes. These luminaires must also operate with optimal efficiency and provide the same level of quality that purely functional site lighting fixtures and general lamping options deliver. It is important for your clients to realize from the inception of the consultation process that exterior architectural lights must anticipate stringent lighting control laws now taking effect across the nation. New LPW requirements, light pollution restrictions, and limitations on the actual lamps that can be used are becoming increasingly. What you propose to your client today must be able to withstand not only the forces of nature and time, but also the forces of change and legislation within human infrastructure and society. Creating an exterior architectural lighting system that is customized to the exact parameters of your client’s site with minimal maintenance, upgrades, and replacements is something we specialize in helping you do.
With proprietary, commercial lighting design software, we will input the data that you gather from any municipal, commercial, academic, government, or sports facility site and scientifically calculate the precise photometric requirements for optimal foot candle density and directional lighting control. These calculations are crucial to helping you develop a competitive and cost effective proposal your client will feel confident will meet their long term needs without future complications, expenditures, or mishaps. In essence, this equates to something of a “less is more” approach to fixture placement, as increased efficiency and efficacy in HID and LED outdoor lights now make it possible to get more lumens per watt from the average lamp, enabling us to illuminate larger areas than ever before with fewer physical fixtures and less obtrusive equipment.
This represents a huge competitive advantage to freelance electrical contractors and smaller design firms who normally lack the funding to invest in high-end development software packages and lack the manpower to engage in long-term collaborative design sessions with clients who know intuitively what they want, but lack the technical knowledge to spec out the details in a timely manner. RLLD Commercial Lighting experts will handle this phase of your proposal development for you by taking raw data you collect in reference to the size, nature, location, and usage of your client’s site and generating a point-by-point schematic of the entire exterior architectural lighting system.
As a general rule, we subdivide exterior architectural lighting systems into component elements that represent the specific operations and aesthetics of a site. This is necessary because different elements of site lighting often fall into overlapping categories of regulation. Parking lot lighting is a good example of this. Parking lot lights must meet the minimum foot candle requirements of the local municipality in which they are installed. They must simultaneously control their light output in such a fashion as to fully comply with local dark sky laws, and they must meet with wind load requirements mandated by higher levels of government. Commercial garage lighting requires an equal level of attention be paid to both vertical and horizontal foot candle density, and calculating this delicate balance requires either access to specialty software or a degree in high-level calculus. Building lights and landscape lights must keynote geometric forms and thematic patterns to be truly effective, and these as well must be both energy efficient and optimized for glare reduction and light pollution control to remain compliant with government mandates.
The key to developing a successful, overall architectural exterior lighting system here is to use only enough visible equipment to compliment the scenery without dominating its elements. Decorative fixtures should be visible, yet “low profile” in their positioning, and they must always bring more attention to the objects they light than they do their own appearance. By paying attention to this simple, but much understated fact in the world of lighting design, you will give yourself an enormous competitive advantage over rival bids that over emphasize equipment and miss the essence of precision design and true site enhancement.
Working with a design services hardware vendor like RLLD will give your business, no matter how large or small, access to resources few of your competitors can obtain, and save both you and your clients time, money, and hassle at the end of the day.
By: R. Neal
Posts Tagged ‘Lighting System’
Exterior Architectural Lighting Products,Supplies
January 14th, 2010Architectural Lighting
January 12th, 2010In today’s marketplace, general contractors, electricians and property managers are routinely engaged in competitive bidding on commercial construction and architectural lighting projects. Working with a commercial lighting distributor who specializes in architectural lighting and who represents multiple manufacturers, gives the commercial designer more freedom to bid specific items without fear of limited options, restriction to only one or two manufacturers, or equipment that fails to meet all necessary safety and light pollution regulatory codes.
Architecture lighting specialists will help you carefully balance the major considerations of safety, security, aesthetics, and regulatory code compliance by helping you precisely match fixtures to exact client specifications, and by accessorizing your system to remain as maintenance free and energy efficient as possible. Extensive planning and consultation with a specialist can be obtained at a small, reasonable fee if your team requires assistance with advance planning or ongoing consultation in developing the specifics of your proposal.
Architectural Area Lighting
Architectural area lights are heavily regulated due to their high lumens output and must illuminate only the intended area(s) without generating light pollution that will create a hazard or a nuisance to a nearby business or residence. It is generally advisable that you plan a proposed architectural area lighting system with specific guidance in the following general areas:
1. Parking lot lighting must meet local foot-candle minimums, minimize glare for motorists, and avoid shining lights into adjacent facilities. Working with a source that can accommodate the Spartan preferences of strictly industrial sites and the more decorative needs of municipalities, corporate headquarters, and hospitality clients can go a long way toward impressive line items that can tip a bidding war in your favor.
2. Parking garage lights must be configured in such a way as to balance vertical foot-candle intensity with horizontal foot candle intensity. This often requires working with a specialist who can input the dimensions of your garage into special software to help you determine which lamps, wattage outputs, and light fixture locations are required to achieve optimal, safe lighting levels in your garage.
3. Outdoor building lights must accent architecture without overpowering it. Different buildings may require anything from wall mounted architectural lights, canopy lights, and wall packs in a wide range of size, voltage, wattage, and color options.
4. Security lights of some sort should always be installed whenever architectural patterns vary or diverge and shadows form under eaves, canopies, walkways, or connecting structures can serve as a hiding place for criminal mischief.
Oftentimes, contractors are hired by offices, churches, municipal buildings, institutions, hotels, restaurants, resorts, and country clubs that require a highly customizes architectural lighting system that will speak to all the many considerations that contractors must factor into developing a truly effective outdoor lighting presentation. These clients often have tight budgets both for equipment and for power requirements, so it is necessary as well to have a wide range of line and low voltage options ready to offer the client at the line item level to make the invoice legally compliant with dark sky and foot candle regulations, practical safety and security concerns, decorative needs, and cost effectiveness through reduced power requirements and minimal long-term benefits.
In these situations, both pre-packaged kits and highly specialized architectural lighting equipment can often tip the balance in favor of a truly comprehensive architectural lighting design that goes beyond the basic cornerstone elements of standard configurations.
Sign and Building Edifice Lighting
Sign lighting can set the tone for the entire site’s lighting system and help your clients more effectively brand their facility. Larger buildings that feature the company brand or logo painted on the building wall itself can be lit with specialty edifice lighting fixtures that will highlight colors and lettering without creating light pollution for surrounding areas. Flagpole lights can be installed very cost effectively to showcase a client’s patriotism and keynote an important element of the landscape in general.
Architectural Landscape Lights
Architectural landscape lighting delivers a more robust illumination to larger campuses with a great deal of area between the property line and primary structure(s). Certain landscape features such as waterworks, decorative sculptures, outdoor break facilities, and recreational areas can be highlighted in such a way as to compliment the architecture of the main building.
Some commercial lighting vendors, such as Easy Rack in Houston, Texas, furnish architectural landscape lighting kits and specialized landscape and building exterior lighting fixtures appropriate for more high-end projects such as resort hotels, five star restaurants, country clubs, and outdoor recreational facilities.
By: Russell Neal
Hotel Lighting A Way To Attract People And Rentals
December 23rd, 2009In order to accommodate the complexity of this project, we first asked the hotel to send us a list of the various room orientations that they required. Dinner parties, seminars, group therapy sessions, and business presentation meetings were all included on the very extensive list we received from the client.. The conference has been renovated recently in such a way that it can be used to host a variety of functions. It has been furnished with new tables, chairs, formal dining tables and architectural lighting so that it can be used for a variety of occasions and special events other than seminars and business meeting. The hotel room was set up with the old fluorescent hotel lighting system. Now the conference room well demands a new lighting system as it has outgrown its capabilities so that it can attract rentals for all the many events for which it could now be used.
There is a need for erecting multiple switch points in order to create different layers of light in different portions of the conference room. There were a number of shows arriving at the local town showcasing products and activities that are meant to attract an older audience. The conference room demands a highly energy efficient lights so that it can host events such as coin show and other product showcases where broad and high visibility is the prime concern. The conference room also needs superior colour rendering, so another layer of architectural lighting from a halogen source would be necessary to make certain that people could clearly distinguish colours when looking through merchandise.
The hotel asked us if we could install hotel lighting by the small stage in the conference room where speakers and musical guests periodically performed. Hotel equipment is not our normal forte, but we told the hotel we would commit ourselves to developing a solution as part of the overall conference room hotel lighting system. Our project would not have been so effective without using our photometric software. Using IES files on a number of different fixture options, we were able to model dozens of hypothetical architectural lighting
scenarios for the conference room’s many possible uses. This allowed us to develop not only a precise equipment list for the hotel, but more importantly, a plan for hotel lighting control in the conference room that would allow management to change the levels and type of light in the conference room quicker than they could change the setup. Placing the main light is, of course, our first decision. It is the simplest thing we could draw to convincingly represent a ball; without the highlight and shadow, it could just as well be a ring, a hole, or a disk.
This new system now allows event coordinators to either turn all lights on at maximum capacity when high lux levels when required, and to turn off fluorescent hotel lighting and precisely adjust incandescent sources and sconces to architectural lighting levels specifically appropriate to respective functions
By: Matt Volpe