Beautiful Light: An Insider’s Guide to LED Lighting for Homes and Gardens, written by lighting designer Randall Whitehead and industry educator Clifton Stanley Lemon, has been published by Routledge Taylor & Francis. This book connects LED lighting technology with the tents of good residential lighting design.

Beautiful Light is a combination of idea book, design resource, and introduction to residential lighting design. It explores the transition in residential lighting from incandescent light sources to LEDs, provides grounding in the fundamental qualities of light, and shows how LEDs can be applied in residential lighting by following enduring lighting design principles. It explains how LEDs differ from older light sources, with graphics that show how to design with light layers, illuminate people, and balance daylight and electric light. Every room of the house, as well as exterior and garden spaces, is addressed in 33 case studies of residential lighting with LEDs, showing a wide variety of lighting projects in different styles.

“Since LEDs are still relatively new to many homeowners and designers, we wanted to write a book showing how they have been used to make really beautiful lighting designs,” said Whitehead. “We also feel that rather than looking back nostalgically at the old incandescent lighting, we should embrace the newer high quality LEDs that are now widely available on the market, as they’re better in every way. We show that excellent lighting design now has even more possibilities with this wonderful technology.”

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LD+A’s Katie Nale recently interviewed a roundtable of lighting experts about changes they see coming in buildings and lighting in a post-COVID world.

My big takeaways were:

• The physical office will survive but may condense and become more flexible to accommodate a larger remote workforce.
• The open office will endure as a collaborative environment.
• Home office lighting is not up to snuff and needs to be addressed.
• Lighting controls will grow even more popular.
• Interest in the relationship between light and health will continue and expand.

Click here to check it out.

Another article in Thomas Schielke’s “Light Matters” series at ARCHDAILY.com, “Creating Walls with Light” examines two early approaches to using light to define walls and make a big impact on architecture. Using examples, he presents uniform wall washing and grazing, sometimes with concealed lighting equipment to enhance the effect.

Click here to check it out.

The application of light is not only concerned with illumination but its absence–shadow–creating intriguing contrasts for certain types of architecture. In this article published by ARCHDAILY.com, Thomas Schielke describes architect’s Louis Kahn’s approach to light and darkness.

Click here to check it out.

The International Association of Lighting Designers (IALD) recently surveyed lighting design business owners and principals about the COVID-19 crisis in May 2020 and October 2020. This survey was repeated in 2021 and posed questions for the January to March 2021 time frame. The result is a snapshot of the state of the lighting design profession in challenging times.

The survey discovered the profession is reacting with continuing resilience to the pandemic and even a few positives.

Click here to check it out.

In a new Facilitiesnet.com article, Chicago-based lighting designer Avraham Mor describes four key elements of successful lighting designs in a post-COVID world.

He writes:

Office lighting can often be an afterthought for workplace designers, but careful integration of lighting into the design from its inception can result in a lighting design that not only supports productivity and workplace health but creates additional functionality for space, enables advanced wayfinding, and even functions as a brilliant, adaptable (and cost-efficient) medium to reinforce corporate identity and branding.

The four key considerations for a successful design, he adds, are flexibility enabled by controls, personal control, health and wellness, and safety.

Click here to read it.

In an article published in LIGHT LINES, four lighting experts say current lighting design practices are based on satisfying outdated tasks, resulting in inadequate designs, missed opportunities, and an improper understanding of efficient delivery of light.

In a nutshell, the experts, including Kevin Kelly, Christopher Cuttle, Peter Boyce, and Peter Raynham, say current lighting design focuses on delivering proper illuminance on a horizontal task plane, which in turn was based on predominant paper-based tasks. They call for providing minimum ambient illuminance, which involves lighting the volume of the space and lighting equipment that delivers light to room surfaces like walls and ceilings as well as the traditional workplane.

Click here to check it out.

Lytei’s beautiful video engages twenty leading lighting designers–including Howard Brandston, Chip Israel, Charles Stone, Nancy Clanton, and more–to celebrate and discuss lighting design.