Shedding New Light On A Heritage Building

摘要

The Sydney office of consulting engineer Bassett is designing the lighting component of a refurbishment of the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney. The project won a Luminaire Design Award in the Illuminating Engineering Society's Excellence Awards in New Zealand last year. Beginning about four years ago, the on-site work will be finished around July. So far, lighting has been completed in the public areas on the ground level and the first and second levels. These public areas connect the three core areas on the north and south side and the central dome. They are lit by pendant spheres - metal halide lamps inside shells of opal acrylic - which are suspended from the ceiling in rows, creating what the architects call a string of pearls effect. However, the architects wanted to reduce the visual clutter this created. They also wanted to give the lighting more "character" as the existing lighting appeared too bland. "The tendency of light spheres is they project light uniformly in all directions so in an architectural sense they tend to be bland," said Tim Shotbolt, group manager of specialist lighting design at Bassett. The architects wanted to emulate the effect of the original gas lighting. However, being a heritage building, there were restrictions on where cables could be run, so the engineers had to work within the existing light fixtures.