Day and night

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Singapore, 19^th March 2014

One of the inevitable things with day light is that at the end of the day it turns into the night! Your living or work place then has to cope with the reverse situation where somehow light and dark are interchanged. Instead of light coming from the sky, light is coming from the ground…I generally work late hours so after having worked with daylight (bright windows) during the daytime, this gradually reverses into night time with a dark window spruced with some sporadic lighting points here and there. I have more difficulty in looking out as now my room is brighter then outside and hence my window acts like a mirror resulting at me mostly looking at myself rather than looking outside.

In any lighting design this dual mood and ambience need to be considered and because they are often total opposites, the approach to lighting, specifically when you are in charge of creating the lighting for booth inside as well as outside, can be quite challenging but exciting. This is why we often insist with our clients that we be involved with both interior as well as with exterior lighting. In a way we include the outside in our conceptual thinking for the inside and vice versa.

This may not be so apparent when you walk the streets of the city where the street lights are generally developed as a stand alone design, but when you scratch a bit deeper you will realise that even in urban lighting design there is (supposedly!) significant consideration for how the street or urban lighting will be affecting people in their homes. Whole lighting standards have been written about the obtrusive effects of lighting…

I came to this subject as earlier I was brain storming about a lighting approach for a massive urban structure located in the middle of a garden, surrounded by high rise buildings. Any lighting design of this dome shaped structure will need to consider the environment and most of all the impact on the people occupying the surrounding buildings. I think I got an answer, but too early days to share with you… 🙂

Light Watch 5-46: Cities take on a whole new dimension at night whether you talk about the little wandering streets of Santorini in Greece, the canals in Venice or the big city streets of New York and Paris…