Site review

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Perth, 14^th October 2014

The thing with all these trips to project sites is that you need to report back to the team on what you saw, what you didn’t see (!) and what needs to be done. Site trips albeit to exotic locations such as Bali or Goa are not holiday trips, you are paid a fee as well as having your travel and accommodation reimbursed (in my case often business class travel) to provide professional feedback about the progress and quality of the lighting installation. Site installation contractors do their work as good as the briefing and documentation that you provide them, but language barriers and cultural differences may as well as a variation of different personal or corporate interests (to put it diplomatically) often result in different interpretations then what was intended. Hence regular site visits by the lead design consultants serves as a safeguard to assure that the end result is as close as possible to the approved design specifications.

Many things on site can go wrong. First of all we often discover that works on site are using an older version of your drawings, in other words the latest design changes have not yet trickled down to the workers on site. When it comes t lighting we also find that the contractor is using the interior design or architects drawings for the lighting and while they most of the time have integrated our design in their drawings, some of them don’t always go the length to actually update their drawings thinking that the site contractor will use our lighting drawings to assure themselves to get it right. This has often resulted in missing details and architectural lighting provisions. If we discover that to late getting it remedied is often an uphill task.

Checking the locations and provisions for the lighting before the lighting is installed are crucial too. While not easy you can see from the cabling and conduits laid that lighting points are being addressed. We checked it out for the landscaping and guestrooms in Goa. It was well planned and organised (a rarity in Asia). But we also discovered that some areas had been forgotten or not yet provided for. Our site visit allowed us to point this out and clarify the lighting intent for several areas.

The review of the mock up room for the guestrooms was extremely useful as we had one executed as specified and the other with alternatives. Mistakes, wrong installation and incorrect wiring were some of the issues we managed to. The overall lighting effect was close to expectation giving us good hopes of a great end result…for now we are preparing our site review report to assure proper follow up.

Light Watch 5-173: Some more pictures of the site and the mock up room…