Ep. 139: Clever Extra - Light. Space. Emotion.
Lighting design plays an enormous role in supporting mood, feelings, perceptions and even human connection and romance. In this time when we’re suffering the side effects caused by extreme deprivation of social interaction and human connection we thought it would be a beautiful thing to talk about how lighting can be designed to soothe our minds, uplift our spirits and help us find clarity, depth and meaning in our day, in our surroundings, in ourselves. To help us visualize and understand both the science and the poetry of lighting design we talked to two experts at the top of the lighting game: Drew Stuart, Field Director and Partner at multi-disciplinary architecture and design studio, INC, and Cecilia Ramos, Senior Director - Architectural Market for Lutron Electronics.
Read the full transcript here.
Cecilia Ramos: Light is complex, there’s a lot of different aspects to light that become the palette with which we can play with in design, and really enhance our spaces.
Amy Devers: Hi everyone, I’m Amy Devers and this is Clever. For this special presentation, titled “Light. Space. Emotion.” we’re taking on the subject of lighting design. It cannot be overstated how important lighting is to a space and here to help us visualize and understand both the science and the poetry, two experts at the top of the lighting game, Drew Stuart, Field Director and Partner at multidisciplinary architecture and design studio, INC, and Cecilia Ramos, senior director of Architectural Market for Lutron Electronics. This conversation is brought to you by Lutron and was recorded in October of 2020 as part of CLOSEUP, a live and virtual two-day international design showcase event presented by WantedDesign Manhattan and ICFF. Here’s “Light. Space. Emotion.”
I’m thrilled to be here with Cecilia and Drew to take on this subject because it actually feels rather urgent. The field of lighting and lighting design has undergone radical transformation with the technological revolution and with this innovation so often the focus is on productivity, convenience, energy savings, all very important aspects to be sure. But today, right now, we’re going to talk about the importance of lighting in helping us to feel more human.
Lighting design plays an enormous role in supporting mood, feelings, perceptions and even human connection and romance. In this time when we’re suffering the side effects caused by extreme deprivation of social interaction and human connection we thought it would be a beautiful thing to talk about how lighting can be designed to soothe our minds, uplift our spirits and help us find clarity, depth and meaning in our day, in our surroundings, in ourselves. Before we get started, a note for the audience, there will be time for questions in the last 10 minutes of this talk, so feel free to submit your questions at any time by way of the Q&A box.
And to get the best experience of CLOSEUP, select the option to go full screen. And we invite you to share on Instagram by using the hashtag @closeupdesign and tagging @wanteddesign, @icff_official, @cleverpodcast and @lutronbydesign. So let’s dive into the experiential qualities of lighting. We’ve all been in situations where the light was just right, golden hour, sunsets, dappled sun under a tree canopy on a picnic, the break of dawn. And when light is just right, it signals our bodies to respond in that beautifully attuned circadian way that humans do, whether it’s time to focus, to wind down or even time to dial the romance.
A major part of lighting design is working with the natural light that our biology is programmed to respond to, so I’d love to hear some examples of how you two have approached working with natural light in interior spaces. Drew?
Drew Stuart: Hi Amy, thank you so much and good to be here with you and Cecilia. You know, I think one of the things that we’re always thinking about is, as humans we have this deep evolutionary response to light. We started out with sunlight and obviously moonlight and firelight and we’re just attuned to those three qualities of light. And so being able to reference that with our eyes and our bodies is just so primary in our response to a space. When we think about these different types of light and how they affect our mood, we’re always trying to sort of recreate that. Both sunlight and especially firelight, and the way we lamp a room and have lamps and recreate those kinds of color temperatures truly affect our psychology.
AD: Cecilia, what is your thought?
Cecilia Ramos: Yeah, I’d say building off what Drew said, I think the beauty of the light that we experience throughout the course of the day and through nature is that it’s a dynamic light. And so you might have a really warm sunrise that then cools off at the height of noon. It’s a brighter, whiter light and then again, by evening it goes dimmer, more amber and then by night time you experience something completely different with the moonlight. And that variation of dynamic light is something really amazing that helps structure our days. But also, you know, gives us the opportunity to have different moments, different moods.
And when you’re mentioning the romantic aspect of it, Amy, at the very beginning, it brings me back to one of the images that you saw in the intro video which was one of Lutron’s original ad campaigns of the 1960s which was called Dial Up the Romance. It had that split screen of the housewife by day and then by night she’s dialled her rotary dimmer, dimmed those incandescent lights and in doing so actually warmed them as well, and created this beautiful, sexy, sultry vibe with her cigarette in hand. And it just speaks to the power of dynamic light and the control of it to make and create these really magical scenes for different special moments of the day.
AD: And how do each of you approach bringing the natural light into the interior space or working with a natural light that’s on offer through windows and window treatments and skylights and architectural details like that?
CR: I’ll jump right in. I think one of the important things to remember is that the light that we experience now is a combination of both natural daylight as well as artificial light that we have in our spaces. And it’s a beautiful thing to be able to meld those two together so that they don’t feel disjointed and so that you feel and experience the change of time throughout the course of the day, both in your interior ambience, as you would outside. In using the concept of natural light it’s important to remember that you can also control the natural light with the shades coming in through the windows as well as tune your lights inside to kind of mimic that daylight and bring it on into the space.
So this is a novel concept, I would say, or one that we’re seeing play out more so in the architectural environments. If you think about a space like our Lutron Experience Center in New York where we employed Ketra Light to have this natural sunlight effect. By day you’ll have this very white, cool, color temperature that it feels like the daylight is just flooding the space. And as the evening progresses, it warms, it becomes more of a warm incandescent glow. And then by night time you can have all sorts of fun and create dappled kind of tree canopy effects with the very amber. Playing to the aspect of biophilia and having natural light permeate the space is a really powerful tool that enhances how we experience that space.
DS: And I would add that I think, you know, again, just because we have this deep biological response to lighting and the sources that we always have such a knee-jerk reaction whenever the lighting doesn’t match. You go out and you buy a fluorescent lamp that claims to be at this 4,000K or 5,000K, that’s like sunlight temperature, when you can see that source of light, we automatically know it’s not coming from the sun. So it’s about matching our expectations to the room or the space that we’re in. And I can say just personally, whenever I move, I’m the first person to go and take out every switch in my new apartment and swap it out for dimmers, just in order to have that kind of same sensation in my own homes.
AD: I know that bad lighting is the worst, for me personally it can cause eye strain or headaches or it makes me anxious, even if there’s too much light or the lights are buzzing or there’s not enough light and I can’t see my way around. Sometimes it’s not really about the amount of light. Like you just said, it’s the quality of light. So what do we need to know about the quality of light in terms of designing interior spaces?
CR: Light is complex, there’s a lot of different aspects to light that become the palette with which we can play with in design, and really enhance our spaces. And there’s some obvious things like the intensity of light, I think we’re all familiar with what a bright light looks like versus a dim light. There’s more technical things like Color Rendering Index, which speaks to how well does that white light render given colors and that becomes very important in museographic applications, but also in places that you just want the materials to look beautiful and true to intent.
And then we begin to speak a little bit about the concept of color tuning and as Drew mentioned, if you go to Home Depot and buy a bulb, there’s a lot of different options of color temperature, right? You can get the bright, white light of daylight, which might be in the range of 4,000 to 5,000K, you can get a ‘soft white light’ which might be 3,000K. But really what we grew up with, most of us, was an incandescent light that maybe was 2,700K, but when it was dimmed down it would come down more towards a range of let’s say 1,800K and candlelight like.
And so the beauty of white tuning is that you can have a single white lamp or light fixture and be able to experience all those different permutations of white light throughout the course of the day. And that becomes a really powerful tool for transforming space. I’ll give you a quick example of how I might use it in my home. As we all are in lockdown and spending a lot of times in our offices, and my office happens to be the dining room table of my kitchen, that space needs to function both as an office space for myself by day and it needs to function as a dinner space for my husband and I in the evening, and then it also needs to function as, let’s say a cocktail place when we’ll have family or friends over.
And so the concept of having that singular architectural space, but being able to transform it into all these different functional environmental moments becomes possible through something like white tuning and control of the light. And I’ll also add to that, quality light also includes optics and beam angles, and so to have it more ambient, more soft by day, and then by night to really be able to punch up the contrast so that you have one spotlight right there on that beautiful live cut wood table and the rest of the space kind of fades away. And so you create moments of hierarchy in doing so. So, I couldn’t live without my dimming and white tuning, that’s for sure.
DS: One of the first things that just always strikes me is the worst kind of lighting is just unconsidered lighting. I hate nothing more than just seeing that grid of lighting on a reflected ceiling plan. When we’re working and this was especially true at the 1Hotel where light was certainly one of our primary tools, we were always thinking about how does the space actually get used and what’s the appropriate type of lighting for a space. So in just this one example that’s up, lighting doesn’t have to be symmetrical about a room. You can light the high side of one wall and then the low base on another.
And then that balance sort of pulls you through the space differently than if it were just lit from the ceiling directly. And even just thinking about what that light does too, it doesn’t have to be fully lit up and bright, but there can be a certain quality of moodiness that also is part of the intrigue and mystery of a space.
CR: And I can’t say enough about the beauty of Drew’s work and how he designs with architecture and light. I think you said it perfectly Drew when you talk about the possibility of drawing people through that space with light. It’s fantastic.
AD: Well, actually I want to talk a little bit more about that because as I was preparing for this talk, I was thinking about how art, cinema and music all have enormous power to resonate and to stir our emotions and our spaces are the stages and backdrops for the unfolding of our lives and they also have power to not only set the backdrop and set the tone, but to stir our emotions. And so Drew, how do you compose with light? How do you draw people through the space?
DS: Thinking about when we were working at the 1Hotel and designing that project, there’s such a conventional way to light rooms and I think what we were really trying to think about is more evocative ways to light the rooms, which is that the light comes from the cracks and the edges and the folds, where things meet, which is much more evocative of how we experience light in the natural world where the sun is moving throughout the day and it’s coming through canopies or it sort of rakes through windows or bounces off buildings.
And then a light in the sort of dead center of a room, you lose all of that sort of mystery and intrigue. When we draw analogies, one of the analogies we were using when we were lighting 1Hotel, it’s like, just that kind of speak light, you’re inside of a barn and what does that light feel like, when the sunlight and the rays come through the cracks in the wood of a barn. And just thinking about what it might have been like to have been on a wharf and sort of standing underneath a wharf and how that light sort of rakes down through the, in between the different elements that are composing a wharf. So just sort of being evocative with light and the way that light may have interacted with the space that was originally on the site of the 1Hotel.
AD: Wow! I felt the poetry in that, thank you for describing that so vividly. Cecilia, you mentioned earlier a pretty graphic example of creating a hierarchy with that spotlight on your dining room table. Can you talk about how you work in that way?
CR: Sure, I think lighting, at its best, has the potential to help us understand and navigate through space. Something like a beam angle or contrast ratios are tools that designers use to realize that vision. And when I think about hierarchy, one of the examples that I always like to talk about is in a luxury retail store, for example, the purpose of that space is to draw people in, get them to peruse and browse and ultimately buy into the brand and buy some goods, right?
And so to think about how lighting designers might approach a retail venue, something like grazing a back wall to create a sense of depth and to kind of pull people through that space. Or create moments of high contrast in deeper parts of the store where they want to bring people in; are methodologies that we can use to really emphasize how we use that space and how something happens emotively. In an office application you can also use lighting in a similar way to guide people through that space for way finding purposes.
There’s a project that we worked on that I saw Ketra Light used to signal when conference rooms were available versus unavailable. And so you can imagine an open floor plan office with rows and rows of desks and these conference pods and for people to know where they could go and host their meetings, the light above these conference pods would glow a certain color to designate if it was available or not available. So those are just two examples from very different worlds, from commercial office versus retail, but where light really begins to tell a story and guide people through the space.
AD: Absolutely, and so along that and on an even more nuanced level, how do things like wall texture and objects and furniture and textiles feature in these scenarios that you’ve highlighted for us? Are there important ways to think about light absorption, bounce, vibrancy? I’m not a lighting designer, so I don’t know the technical language, so I’ll let you educate us here, Cecilia?
CR: Well if we kind of take it down to the basic level, the light we see is that which is reflected off a given object. And in thinking about that, the wavelength of light either absorbed or are reflected back to the human eye, and that’s how we perceive color and texture and form. And so if you think about a white light, you know, you take that white light, you put it through a prism and it’s comprised of all the wavelengths of different colors, it’s essentially a whole rainbow within.
That gives us a realm of possibility to explore such that, let’s say we took that white light and really made it pumped up with the red wavelengths, then you’ve reflected on an apple and when it comes back to the human eye it looks very, very red. So these kind of technical applications or explorations of white light, you know, raise the bar of what designers can do. You know, one of the concepts that we see played out in the art world, for example, is manipulating that white light with vibrancy, which is ultimately which wavelengths are in it, of what color.
And this allows us to experience colors and textures in a completely different way. I’ll give, again, another concrete example of that. There is a painting I was illuminating for an art collector and it was predominantly a white background and it had a lot of line work that was black and red and yellow. And when we lit that with the warm white light, a 3,000 Kelvin light, the red looks fantastic, but then the white background, which was actually near a window, looked very kind of dingy and yellow because the window light was so crisp and blue.
But then when we lit it with a 4,000 Kelvin, the painting fell flat on the reds because there wasn’t as much red wavelength in that 4,000 Kelvin light. And so to be able to say, okay, I’m going to hold the 4,000 Kelvin, so that kind of crisper, whiter, blueish feeling, but pump in the red wavelength of light to make the red line work pop, that was an application of vibrancy that really took that painting to a different place and realized the collector’s vision of having it really look beautiful adjacent to a window. So there’s a lot of different ways that we can play with light to realize those visions.
AD: I had no idea it got so involved, that is fascinating. Drew, what’s your method?
DS: Well, I’ll play off Cecilia’s way of talking about, just lighting art. Some of our work has dipped into the world of exhibitions and we’ve done a whole series of work with the Jewish Museum. And at one point, one of the shows was, the centrepiece of this show is this amazing series of murals that Chagall had painted for a theater in Moscow. And the murals had been preserved over time and reinstalled in the Jewish Museum for this exhibition. But the show was largely ephemera, costumes, maquettes, little flyers and pictures from the time.
And we created this progression where all of the rooms started out almost as in blackness and dark. And as you progressed to the exhibition, the room slowly got lighter and lighter, up until the room that was recreating the size of the original theater and had Chagall’s murals placed in relation to the space as they would have been placed in the original. And that sort of progression and sort of using the paint palette, but also the idea of absorbing all the light until you got to the full Chagall murals, to where they finally glowed in the space, you got to experience them in full color.
Sort of once you left that room, it was a progression back into darkness and eventually the death of the original theater patron. So it was just, you know, sort of creating that type of experience through light as well, and showing off these incredible murals is a way to handle light. And I think interestingly, when we do gallery work for small up and coming galleries; it’s always about the mix, right? So we’re always looking to get both that 4,000K light as a sort of ambient light, but also you know, that 3,000K light as direct spotlight on pieces of art for the gallery owners to have that sort of manipulation of light within the space.
AD: That journey that you took us on, I could almost feel it from the darkness into this sort of bright, vibrant recreation of a theater. What a powerful way to use light, not only to set the stage, but to actually tell the story. To be the journey. That’s incredible. I always like to talk about process, you’re both architects and so in order to employ and deploy some of these lighting techniques, artfully, at what phase of the project is it time to think about lighting? What are some of the major considerations in terms of designing lighting into the project?
DS: For us at INC, we don’t do a project without a lighting designer. I mean a lot of the concepts I’m talking about are things that I’ve stolen words from all the lighting designers we’ve collaborated with over the years. You know, we insist on their involvement from the very, very beginning because if we’re not sort of thinking about how we’re shaping space with light, it’s not going to be a completely sort of resolved project. Here you’re getting a little sneak peek of a project that we’ve just completed in Nashville that has all these sort of glowing coffers and that’s about sort of expanding the ceiling, and also highlighting this incredible art collection that was there.
But again, huge involvement from the lighting designer from the very beginning and even at these sort of ceiling coffers, the idea was that there’s a historic hotel in Nashville that we were all sitting having drinks very, very early on in the process. And we were sitting there and I sort of turned to the group and said, this is the kind of light that we should have in the lobby. And that really became the progenitor for all of these sort of different lighting moves that we did throughout the entirety of the hotel.
CR: When I think about Drew’s projects and he’s a total master of ambience in the hospitality world. It just feels right. Nobody has to think about it right? And so when you posed the question about what to keep in mind, I think simplicity is really one of the things that is important to keep in mind because you want to experience the space, you want to experience the motions. You don’t want to experience the technology, let’s say, right, behind it. The technology should just work. And so making sure that it’s simple from the very start of the design, choosing systems that can be flexible and so that if somebody wants to make a design change at the last minute, or choose a different materiality for a couch, but you want to have the light still look beautiful on it.
You have the ability to make those last minute changes without shredding all your documents and starting from scratch. And the simplicity at the time of commissioning, right? So whether that’s an app based technology that you can sit there and dial up your lights and change the color temperature, or just scene set because especially in the hospitality environment, having a daytime scene and evening scene, a night time scene, a cleaning scene, all of that should be easy to set and then easy to trigger.
We can oftentimes get bogged down in the systems and again, the tech, but the reality is, it should be simple and seamless and there’s definitely ways to do that, but the planning has to start from the very beginning of the design process in order to make that successful.
AD: From the very beginning. I’m glad you brought up the tech. One of the last things I ever want to do is troubleshoot a light switch. I feel like as a user it should be a given -
CR: All of us! [Laughs]
AD: That I’m going to know how to turn on the lights when I get into a room. I mean sometimes if it’s dark you have to feel around for the light switch, but I don’t want to fumble with an app or not know what app I have to use or download something or find a control panel that doesn’t make any sense to me. So you kind of touched on how to streamline the user experience, but maybe from the perspective of the architecture, the designer, the project manager, as a user, what are the important things? How do we keep these spaces that you spend so much time and energy lighting beautifully, but these schemes, if they’re not usable by the end user after you’re long gone, then your work is kind of not as effective. So do you have to design in a kind of usability into the whole program?
CR: Yeah, for sure, I think you always want to put yourself in the end users shoes, right, because they’ll be the ones living with the system for years to come. And you want it to be simple. And so I always advocate for no matter how many apps or software programs that you have running on the back end, you always need a very simple switch on the wall, or a dimmer on the wall. And it could be a keypad that just has scenes that say ‘daytime – night time – off’ or it could be a simple zone based control where it’s down lights, pendant light, table lamp, dim up and dim down.
But I think having very clear control at the points where you want to have them, whether that’s on the wall or a little remote control by your bed so you can press the ‘all off’ button and have everything just put you to bed, I think that’s incredibly important to think about. And I think one of the critical things that I always put out there and advocate for is that even when you have these keypads that are scene based control, I always think having a dim up and down function is pretty important because what’s right for one person may not be right for another and the ability to customize in situ is a nice thing to have as well.
AD: Thank you for that, because even if I have a scene for ‘got to bed,’ my days aren’t the same every day.
CR: Exactly.
AD: And my life doesn’t adhere to routine. So I might need to adjust that. We’re going to take questions from the audience in just a little bit, but before we do, I want to dive back into some of these beautiful scenes that you both have set in terms of using lighting design and when everything is dialled in and it’s lit as beautifully as you have conceived, can you take us on a journey through that space? What is working right? What does it feel like? I know the feeling of when it feels right, I know when it feels wrong, but can you put a little more language and some description to that, Drew, since you’re the master?
DS: Well, interestingly, another project that some of the New York folks might be aware of is our project out at TWA. Interestingly, almost the entirety of our scope was completely lightless in terms of natural light. So the majority of our program has, in fact, no natural lighting. So what we were doing was trying to capture all of that kind of moodiness that you get from natural light in a space, but doing it in an artificial way. And really taking inspiration from the masters. Eero Saarinen designed the Flight Center as this most provocative futuristic vision of what air travel would look like, and taking all of that energy and sort of translating that into what has become a modern day airport hotel.
He was doing little tricks when he was doing the GM motors project, where they would unveil cars. And so again, we joke that this is our posthumous collaboration with him. Re-imagining concepts that he brought to the table, but in all new, interesting ways. But also just tricks that they were doing in the day, when lighting office buildings was just the beginning of its conception and transforming that into how we would do it now, but still using all the tricks they were doing 50-60 years ago.
AD: Well, speaking of tricks, lighting can also function as your co-host of an event, master of ceremonies or an usher in terms of signalling a kind of behavioral change amongst your guests or audience. Dim the lights in the theater, flicker them when the intermission is over, that kind of thing. In what way do you both use lighting to sort of encourage and work with these social functions?
DS: Sure, I think in the pre-Covid world we were, at INC we were quite well-known for our yearly big, huge parties and in our offices we’ve sort of designed these fixtures that are mirrored and they have light that shines up and down and we have white tuning built into them. As you can imagine, during the day we have it set to around 3,000K, but all of a sudden that very same space can turn into a party where we’ve dimmed those lights down and taken them down to 1,800K and all of a sudden the desks that people work at, people are dancing on them and it’s all moody and clubby in there.
And then when it’s time to go, you can just hit those lights, full brightness [laughs] and send everyone scurrying on their way [laughs]. That was the kind of fun we had pre-Covid.
CR: I can attest to that, it was very successful in his office [laughter]. You created great moods and ambiances, but it’s important that light can also be used to signal social cues, right? You talked about the theatrical applications where you turn on the lights to get somebody out of the theater, out of a party. I think one really interesting way to use light that I experienced this year, again, pre-Covid shutdown is we hosted an event with C-CAP, which is the culinary arts program for fundraising for students who want to become chefs and it was at Chelsea Piers and when we were talking about, with the organizers about what they wished to accomplish with lights, their main complaint was okay, we host this great event every year, we have these beautiful tables with all the top chefs in New York, whether it’s Danielle or Le Bernadin or whoever it might be.
But when it comes time for the chairman to get on the stage, people keep eating at the tables and they don’t pay any attention to the talks happening on stage. And so they asked us, can you help us with that. We used Ketra Lights, which are dynamic in changing whites and also in saturated colors. And so throughout the course of the evening there were beautiful, warm, white, you know, really punching on the food and making everything feel sophisticated and sharp.
And then when we cued the stage and the speaking portion of it, we turned those lights all of a sudden to a very dramatic red on the table. And then the lights on the stage went warm white and focused on the speakers. And that was the cue signal, you know, step away from those tables, pay attention to the speaker. And it was successful and it was just interesting use of light in a way that I hadn’t really thought about pre-event. But when we were posed with that challenge, that’s the solution that we collectively came upon. Social cues and light can be hand-in-hand.
AD: And it worked.
CR: It works! You can also turn them off and go completely black, that would also work [laughter].
AD: How effective. Okay, we’re almost out of time, so I want to take a couple of quick questions from the audience. Meghan, do we have any questions from the audience?
Meghan: We do, yeah, we have a few. So someone asked: How does a homeowner get started, is there a Lutron professional who can design a lighting system for a new house, or should one hire a lighting designer?
CR: It can go either way, right? So for people who want intro level, DIY solutions, there’s really brilliant systems called Caseta that you can buy at Home Depot or Amazon and that’s a do-it-yourself solution. You install the dimmers, you can program them, have them on an app and have all those great things like scene changes or remote controlled light by your bedside so you can turn off all your lights by night by a little push of a button. So that’s basic and simple and DIY.
You can also go more sophisticated. I think as Drew said, using a lighting designer on your projects is a beautiful thing. It opens up a whole world of creative possibilities that perhaps someone wasn’t aware of previously. Depending on how sophisticated they want the system to be, or what aesthetic of keypads they want, there’s a whole range of Lutron solutions that can play for different needs and audience types as well.
AD: Meghan, what’s the next one?
MD: These are two different questions, but I think they go hand-in-hand, so I’m going to ask them both. Do you have any tips on dealing with difficult lighting in a residential rental and what are your preferred color temperatures for residential applications?
AD: Since I know Drew installs dimmers, as soon as he moves to a new place, I’m sure you’ve got -
DS: I’m using specifically my own rentals as the example there. I find an electrician, pay him a couple of hundred bucks, swap out the switches for dimmers and I’ve also been known to go to Ikea and swap out their ugly rental light fixtures for slightly better ones from Ikea. And it’s a few hundred dollars for an electrician, but it makes all the difference in the world. And honestly, using the Caseta system, you can get your ceiling lights and your lamps all set on different scenes that you can very easily program through an app. It’s really easy now. And my favorite color temperature is 2,800.
AD: Tell us why, what’s 2,800?
DS: Because you know, 3,000 tips a little cool and I think when it comes down to these things, it’s always just to be a little warmer, you know. We’re home mostly in the evenings and the mornings, or at least we used to be [laughs]. We’re used to that kind of warmer light at sunrise and sunset. Cool light is very dangerous when you get into the 4,000, it has to be handled very, very thoughtfully to figure that out. So I would always tip warmer when possible.
AD: So we sometimes talk about interrogation and operating rooms as being the sort of worst lighting for regular people because it’s so bright and it causes people to crack in the interrogation room, in the surgery. It’s great for seeing deep into people’s bodies. What temperature is that because I don’t want that in my house? [Laughs]
CR: Well, it’s interesting because I think in terms of color temperature, it’s not that crazy. You’re probably talking something like 4,500, 5,000 Kelvin, which with your windows open, by midday, that’s the color of the daylight coming in. But I think what’s really interesting in those spaces is that you’re isolated from daylight and you’re being pumped with that very cold color temperature in very heightened quantities, right? It’s not dim, it’s very bright, and so I think that’s what makes it incredibly uncomfortable. But the color temperature of those spaces, when relative to daylight, really isn’t that crazy off, which is interesting.
DS: I think it has a tendency, it’s about lumens and not temperature so much.
AD: Yeah, I mean isolation from daylight, because moonlight is pretty cool as well, right?
CR: Exactly.
AD: But you would never be in an interior space with no windows surrounded by moonlight, that would just never happen?
CR: Right, and the moon is bright, but it’s relative to everything else that we experience with electric light, it’s actually quite dim, right? You think about putting your hand out in the middle of the night in moonlight and you can see the trace of the hand, you can see a little bit of glow, but you can’t see the details. So it goes to speak of how dim moonlight is and that’s one of the reasons that we can, in a sense, tolerate that color temperature.
AD: Meghan, do we have any more questions before we wrap this up?
MD: Yeah, one more. So someone said: I visited the Lutron Experience Center and was amazed by how much the light changed the mood of the space, but was especially struck by the artworks on the wall, can you talk a little bit about this?
CR: In this space and in New York City, and if anyone is in the city and wants to take a virtual tour with us or post-Covid come by and visit, we’d love to have them. One of the things that we really wanted to play with was how does light transform materiality in art. And so you know, we chose paintings that were colorful, because we wanted to test the way that light renders color. But also from different artists, because we want to experiment a little bit and see what works and what doesn’t work.
All that to say that our space essentially is a lab for ourselves and in exploring all of that we discover things that we never would have thought could happen, or things that we hadn’t thought about. So a little bit of trial and error, a lot of fun, is how we chose the art pieces.
AD: Well, I want to thank you both so much for joining us here today and thank you to the audience too. And if you’d like to continue this conversation, you can do so online @wanteddesign, on Instagram. Thank you Cecilia Ramos, thank you Drew Stuart for this enlightening conversation and for the good work that you’re doing in the world. And thank you to Lutron for presenting this conversation and WantedDesign Manhattan and ICFF for hosting the event.
CR: Thank you Amy, thank you Drew.
DS: Thank you so much.
AD: Thanks for listening. For more information on Lutron, visit Lutron.com. The second edition of CLOSEUP is coming this May, 16-18. To learn more, head to wanteddesignnyc.com. To see images and read the show notes, click the link in the details of this episode on your podcast app, or go to Cleverpodcast.com where you can also sign up for our newsletter. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Clever on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you would please rate and review, it really does help us out. We love chatting with you on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, you can find us at Clever Podcast and you can find me at Amy Devers. Clever is produced by 2VDE Media with editing by Rich Stroffolino, production assistance from Laura Jaramillo and Anouchka Stephan and music by El Ten Eleven. Clever is proudly distributed by Design Milk.
This conversation is brought to you by Lutron, and was recorded in October of 2020 as part of CLOSEUP, a live & virtual two-day design showcase event presented by WantedDesign Manhattan and ICFF.
TWA Hotel NYC 2019
TWA Hotel NYC 2019
TWA Hotel NYC 2019
White Tuning at Lutron HQ- Cool
White Tuning at Lutron HQ- Warm
White Tuning at Lutron HQ- Red
General Motors Showroom
1950’s Lutron “Dial Up Romance” add.
"The Capri furnishes light as you desire it." Vintage Lutron Add.
Clever is produced by 2VDE Media. Thanks to Rich Stroffolino for editing this episode.
Music in this episode courtesy of El Ten Eleven—hear more on Bandcamp.
Shoutout to Jenny Rask for designing the Clever logo.
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