Responding to the client’s request for a flexible space, lighting designer Suzan Tillotson and her team devised a dynamic scheme meant to engage the New York employees of the advertising agency R/GA, as well as to foster their creativity and well-being. The design revolves around an indirect lighting strategy using 10,000 RGBW, PAR38 LED lamps bundled into groups of four sockets. Affixed to a unistrut grid below the existing waffle-slab ceiling—painted white for reflectivity—these custom industrial-style fixtures are distributed at regular intervals throughout the two levels of the 134,000-square-foot space (in both open and enclosed areas), then configured to uplight each ceiling coffer. The lamps, by Ketra, have a high color-rendering index (CRI), and wireless connectivity through which they can be programmed to change color, or color temperature in the white spectrum. Taking advantage of these capabilities, the lighting designers created a circadian-rhythm program, which begins at 2700K in the morning, subtly shifts to 4000K at midday, and gradually returns to a warmer color temperature in the evening. Staff can override this system easily with a tablet to incorporate color or alternate scenes for events. A Zigbee-compliant device from Ketra enables the system to communicate wirelessly with a Crestron DMX master control that also ties into the window shades and a/v equipment—simplifying the opera- tion of all three for the office manager.

Next case study: Swedish Medical Center Behavioral Health Unit by ZGF Architects