Illumination Awards

Interior Lighting Design: Confidential Corporate Fit-Out

Renée Leskowat & Diane McNabb Rodriguez | Hartranft Lighting

This 40-floor, 1-million sf corporate fit-out includes 9 specialty floors with a full gym, juice bar, tech support bar, running track, quiet room, meeting spaces, multipurpose room, open office, flexible workspaces and private offices, break out areas, boardrooms, executive suites, classrooms, extensive art program, and an experience hall with an immersive art installation.

The sheer scale and compressed timetable of the project required close collaboration with the extensive design and construction teams to bring the project in on time and within budget. Each unique space deserved its own tailored lighting approach, yet maintains an overall aesthetic, achieved with extensive iterations and thorough detailing and coordination.

Lighting design ensured glass enclosed meeting spaces glowed from within, specialty finishes were accented, layers of lighting supported open and enclosed spaces, and artwork was fittingly celebrated. Careful placement and spacing in response to architectural rhythms results in a beautiful quality of light with minimal hardware. Special attention was given to providing separately controlled direct and indirect sources throughout to reduce eye strain and increase user flexibility.

Daylight harvesting and smaller controls zones were utilized, exceeding code requirements to enhance the functionality and user adaptability of the lighting.

Ambitiously reduced lighting power densities helped the project achieve LEED Gold. The building occupants reduced their footprint from more than twice the space, upgrading from a more traditional workplace to hybrid attendance and a range of workspace options that better accommodate the diverse users while providing massive efficiencies to the company and its clients.

Experiential Lighting Design: NC State Hunt Library BookBot Relight

Leah Robinson | Pivotal Lighting Design

NCSU's Hunt Library employs a robotic delivery system that can store up to two million items and deliver any of them within five minutes of a click in the online catalog. Visitors and students can view the ingenuity of the "bookBot" at work through windows that allow them to look into the vast archive.  The archive system consists of four 120-ft long aisles flanked by 50-ft tall storage racks filled with bins of books each served by a robotic carriage system with a crane arm and bin-picking armature collectively known as the bookBot.  Spotlights were also mounted on the cranes to highlight the robotic movement.

In the years since opening, the onboard lighting had proven insufficient to see the robots working in the darkness. To compensate, the library resorted to using the overhead fluorescent maintenance lighting during active hours.  Those lights were never intended for this duty cycle and, consequently, were steadily failing.  A lift could not be used for maintenance because the aisles were too narrow and obstructed by a floor-mounted power rail. 
 
The bookBot is in-use almost daily over the course of the year, but the relight project would necessitate a minimum 6-week shutdown. This inconvenience presented the library a unique opportunity to further enhance the visitor experience.  The new LED lighting system would incorporate white+RRR boards to bathe the active aisle (or aisles) in Wolfpack red when the carriages were in motion. Simultaneously, the white lighting would extinguish while the robot traversed the aisles.  Additionally, on-board red LED tape light installed on the crane arms would engage with the robot activation and provide a dynamic element as the red light shown against the shiny metal bins while the carriage sailed down the aisles.  When the carriage returned to rest, the normal all-white state would be restored.

 2025 Illumination Award Slides