Lighting for public buildings

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What binds our society together, allows it to function and makes it worth living? Not least the communal buildings in which people as visitors, citizens or politicians move, gather and exchange information. Buildings for public administration, educational facilities, theatre, congress centres, railway stations and airports: their architecture, equipment and condition reflect the needs and reality of a society. Creating new features or maintaining existing structures provides both opportunities and responsibilities for planners and designers. Care and quality in all planning aspects are decisive. Light assumes much more than just functional tasks – it also determines the character and representative symbolic force of public buildings.

Which tasks does light adopt in public buildings?

Thinking in lighting functions

Lighting functions serve as a theoretical model for flexibly responding to highly diverse uses and architectural situations for the lighting of public buildings, and for modularly combining lighting solutions and scaling these according to needs.

Illuminating public buildings needs to fulfil a wide variety of needs: the spatial plan and design aspects, together with the financial framework conditions, form the basis for the lighting concept.
The range of tasks can include a variety of nuanced architectural situations beginning with the facade and lighting of the entrance zone and foyer, circulation zones such as stairs and corridors and multifunctional rooms and peripheral areas required for management, workshops and archives. A theoretical model of lighting functions helps to evaluate the quality of lighting not just according to purely quantitative criteria such as illuminance. it also places the use of a spatial situation in focus. This form of zoning allows individual tasks to be identified: should an area receive visitors, represent particular elements and values, provide orientation, guide through the building or provide space for specific events? At the start of each lighting project it makes sense for lighting designers to ask the following three questions for each required functional area:

Which architectural and functional importance does the room or spatial zone have?
Which tasks in the building can be implemented with lighting to provide all users with a positive, identity-enhancing experience?
Which individual lighting strategy and methods of lighting are suitable as the basis for lighting design?

Design in lighting functions

A comparison of two design approaches

Can office lighting be attractive and cost-efficient at the same time?

Qualitative lighting design for foyers

Zonal lighting analyses where the user needs which light: luminaires with good glare control and simultaneously high cylindrical illuminances, light the workstations, enable good visual comfort and achieve good, pleasant facial illumination. Illuminated vertical surfaces ensure a bright spatial impression and balanced contrast conditions for work on screens. Illumination of the circulation zone in the central aisle allows pleasant orientation.

Conventional lighting design for foyers

A matrix solution with panel lights does not reference the visual task of the user. Differing forms of work are supported with the same lighting. This is therefore not optimally matched to the needs of all users, and losses in terms of ambience and concentration must be expected. Furthermore, the low-contrast and undefined appearance of the room may cause fatigue and energy needs for sufficient lighting also increase.

Find out more about the added value provided by a perception-orientated lighting in the ERCO case study for illuminating community rooms!