Dazzling Lighting Design
Harwood No. 14’s striking silhouette in the Harwood District lights up the Dallas skyline, standing out as a shimmering jewel amongst the buildings cropping up in Uptown. Created by Corgan’s lighting team led by lighting designer and visionary Michael Janicek, the intriguing lighting design emphasizes the building’s architecture and interiors. Bringing over thirty years’ experience in lighting design for some of the world’s most stunning monuments, art, interiors, and exteriors, Michael’s vast expertise and creative design methods illuminate our firm’s architecture and design work. In this Q&A, learn how Michael chose the lighting that makes this project especially brilliant and unique.
Q&A with Michael Janicek
Harwood No. 14’s finned curtain wall facade distinguishes it from others in the area. How does the lighting differ from other towers in Dallas and other cities?
Unlike most high rises and buildings, the lighting is accomplished through downlighting. We looked at installing more common uplighting, however, Kengo Kumo, the Japanese architect we partnered with, wanted the viewer’s eye to move up and down the building. While uplighting tends to aim the light off into space, downlighting grazes the surface and graduates as it travels down the sides of the building. Not only does uplighting create a different look, but it also creates light pollution – and our skies have quite enough. In Europe, designers are careful to use high-end softer lighting that produces quieter lighting.
How would you describe the effect the lighting produces?
The design gives the building a glowing effect like a shimmering mirage or ghostly image. The way the downlight hits and plays on the glass surface creates a gauzy glow, which looks like a flowing draped fabric or cascading waterfall. Rather than using singular linear light fixtures or a series of individual fixtures which outline the building’s architecture, we used pinpoints of light which simulate a jeweled necklace around the perimeter. Seen from an ariel view, each dot of light sparkles like dazzling rhinestones, producing a jewel box quality.
What types of light fixtures were used to create the desired effect?
The fixtures look small from a distance but are large, 10-inch heavy, square LED fixtures with custom made brackets angled to be the right distance from the surface. Each light fixture is mounted between two decorative fins attached to the building and vary in shape and size. The metal fins break up the light, producing variance and movement. The light reaches from above all the way down to the ground, negating the need for landscape lighting. Since the light shines down on the plant materials, it's not nearly as harsh as street lighting.
The entire Harwood district is distinguished by warm colored lighting. Where most developments typically use 4,000 kelvin, Harwood prefers using 2,700 Kelvin fixtures to create a warm, even temperature. LED lights feature parabolic reflector lenses with smaller apertures to refract and create a tighter beam which offer millions of possibilities for lighting design. LED lights are also more sustainable, don’t use mercury, and offer a lower wattage to save electricity. LEDs are also compact and scalable for smaller and more attractive light beams. The life expectancy of LEDs is between 70,000 to 90,000 kw hours versus 15,000 hours for incandescent and fluorescents.
A rendering program calculated light density, gray scale to determine the right size of the light beam.
Hundreds of studies and iterations were created to correctly position the light beams.
The light bounces and plays off the fins to create the gauzy effect.
Downlighting illuminates the landscape doing away with harsh street light fixtures.
Our team conducted hundreds of studies to calculate the desired beam spread. A tight beam travels more distance than a wide beam and the light intensity gradually dissipates. Corgan uses a rendering program to determine values and gray scale. Our designers created hundreds of iterations to calculate the correct beam angle, measuring photometrics and multipliers to produce the beam and intensity we wanted. We presented our findings to the client and collaborated closely with the factory to manufacturer custom fixtures meeting our specifications.
The lobby’s lighting is stunning as well. Describe how the design illuminates the walls and ceiling.
Like the exterior, we wanted to avoid harsh lines in the lobby. The fins from the outside continue inside, moving across the fins in the ceiling baffles. A multiple array of LED reflectors made up of short linear lines bridge across the baffles and glow. Each line has a series of dots that sparkle like dazzling jewels as they hit facets of the fins at different angles – creating yet another version of the necklace. Glowing linear light fixtures along the core illuminate the walkway and brighten the stone walls.
