Proceedings of: Workshop on Improving Building Design for Persons with Low Vision

Introduction

Comment by Jim Woods: Let me just quickly introduce David because he’s taken the challenge to substitute for whom we originally had here. David is Senior Designer at George Sexton Associates. He’s a design consultant. He’s been there since 1985; managed many large projects, including the British Art Center at Yale, Peabody Essex Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, et cetera. He did his graduate work in art at Carnegie Mellon University. So we’ve got a big contingency here from Carnegie Mellon.

I played on the hockey team and the – (inaudible). In addition, I worked on MOMA downtown expansion and what we called the Swingline building. That was the MOMA Queens, and the Boston museum is about to open, early November.

I have several low-vision clients. And there are some here in town that we’ve been working with since 1988. They’re very faithful, energetic clients that have always seemed to have projects. And I met them when they were in their 50s. So now they’re experiencing problems with low vision. And they have said, use us, experiment with us. We’ve done some very unusual design with them. They own an art collection, American art, and they own glass, Tiffany glass, American paintings. And as you can probably tell, one of my specialties and interests is museum lighting, art lighting, and building environments related to art. So I’m going to tell kind of parallel stories here.

Museum Lighting

We’re helping preserve the Louis Kahn’s British Art Center at Yale. And I’m involved with three projects up there. Recently completed was the photo studio. And the challenge that they had was re-photographing the entire collection, digitally. And they needed to have a design so they could color-match the actual painting to the monitor readout. And I hadn’t done anything like that before. But in interviewing the clients, which were five people, the photographer, the registrar, I began to understand what they needed.

So I designed a series of custom fixtures and we customized the [lighting] for these fixtures. We elevated the color temperature. These were all MR-16-based lamps, banks of fixtures that roll on racks. The photo studio [is in] a basement area. That’s another thing to point out, because usually the photo studio’s in the basement. Very gutsy, all the structures shown. So we designed this, what I thought was a really neat system.

I got feedback after the installation. People would walk by the door and just do double takes. And the common comment would be, “when did you get a skylight, because just a beautiful quality of light -- basically, the whole back wall of the studio.” They’ve got large portraits, small portraits, large landscapes, varying sizes. So basically, the entire back wall of the studio is magnificently lit with this quality of light that was evocative of daylight.

So I finally went up and saw it and they were doing a photo shoot. And I don’t know if it was a Rayburn or a Joshua Reynolds painting on the easel, a beautiful woman, this scale. And when they flipped on the photo lights, it’s a warmer color temperature. But when the monitor check comes on, elevated color temperature is available. And it was amazing to see the difference in the rendering of the painting. You saw the whites and reds more vibrantly when the new lighting system was on for monitor check. So I registered that. I said there was all sorts of definitions that I hadn’t seen before. And it became intriguing to me.

Application of Museum Lighting Principles to Low Vision Persons

And so I’m going to switch stories back to the collectors. One of them said – there’s a couple in town, and one of them said I just can’t see anymore; I’m having a problem shaving. And I said we can add more fixtures in your bathroom. So we ordered another series of high-quality adjustable fixtures. And I kept in mind that he said [to] experiment with these. Think about how to solve this problem.

And so I spent about an hour, hour-and-a-half focusing, and I did all sorts of arrangements with the lamps, used different wattages, beam spreads and color temperatures. So I got the mix that I thought was appropriate. Then I went away and let him use it. Interviewed him. So, just to let you know, I’m going to jump around here as well.

Importance of Post Occupancy Evaluations

George [Sexton] has a strong feeling – or a principle - that as we finish the project we need to go back and visit the users after about six months to a year to see how everything is working. And we do these interviews and we ask how things are going and how things could be improved, so it’s for their benefit and ours that we learn how to better our designs.

The point I’m trying to make is that I picked up on details that I couldn’t see under just normal tungsten halogen lighting. It’s an ongoing experiment, of course. But this mixing is a very interesting, intriguing facet of lighting for me. What I saw at Yale, that reds were vibrant -- there was a vibrancy that I experienced at Yale and I brought that to this client. And so he gets -- so total facial illumination was better than just distinction – (inaudible). So that’s a direct experience that I wanted to share with you all.

Balance of Glare and Brightness

In the museum environment we deal with all sorts of issues that relate to glare, to balance, brightness balance. When we light an exhibition [in a gallery], we attempt to light the perimeter to offer generosity with space [and to] balance the lighting that aims on the objects with that backdrop. So we’re building more or less a tableau, you might say. So it’s all about the sensation of well-being, comfort, protection against glare. Just building this total environment wrapper.

There’s a great publication by Gary Thompson, who is the head of conservation of the British Museum; it’s called “The Museum Environment.” And he goes into all the components that make up the museum environment – lighting, temperature, humidity, and so forth. There are some great passages that he’s written about lighting that kind of dissects the glare and ways to control it.

And one thing that I think is intriguing is that when you want to wash a wall then you’re working at cross-purposes because in terms of glare and comfort, that to light a wall you might need to use lenses and reflectors that are naturally glare-producers. So it comes down to design, fixture design to be able to offer the most sophisticated fixture to deliver that ability to wash a wall [that] makes an environment feel comfortable and balanced.

When we’re lighting an exhibition, we’ll typically say that a painting should be [at] a value two in terms of illumination, and a wall should be a value of one. So that ratio is very important to us. Gary Thompson even writes about all that and he says that the best and sharpest viewing relates to that general ratio, meaning that if you were to spotlight, purely spotlight, your viewing ability drops off because you’re actually comparing it to a dark wall, comparing a painting to a dark wall. So he talks eloquently about balance.

In the museum environment it’s about balance and keying. So I think that there are applications in the other built environments that relate to what one can do in the museum environment. I mean, you can think of your favorite museums in town and nationally and internationally, and you might relate your comfort that you experience in these environments somewhat to light. So next time you experience an exhibition, just pay attention to what you think is being done with the lighting. I think there are things to learn from museum applications and museum lighting.