The Art of Lighting Design:
Hands-on Education for Design Professionals

By Janet Lennox Moyer, IALD, LASN Associate Editor

During the 2006 Landscape Lighting Institute course, two teams (Don Bradley and Joan Roca, and Mike Nantz and John Johnanson) treated the forest quite differently. Using all low voltage halogen MR11 and MR16 sources, they lit the young tree by the forest entry more brightly to draw attention to the path and sculpted the trees across the forest individually, but within a contrast range that provided a cohesive composition.
Photos by George Gruel/www.georgegruel.com

The field of landscape lighting continues to explode. New light sources, new high quality fixtures and associated equipment keep flooding the market. My goal has always been to ‘raise the bar’ both in my own work and by helping others. That was the initial reason that I wrote The Landscape Lighting Book — now in its 2nd edition and I am about to start working on the 3rd edition.

Because I had difficulty getting information in the early 1980s, I wanted to share my knowledge and my field experiences.

At the class area in the fall of 1999, students at LRC used a combination of low-voltage downlights to create a path through the forest and metal halide uplights to wash the conifers. They left the area just to the left of the path dark, with the intention of accentuating the area and path. After seeing this photograph, they felt that it made the forest appearance somewhat disjointed.

Just before I started on the book, in the mid 1980s, I began building a hands-on landscape lighting course at the request of the head of the Landscape Architecture Extension program at UC Berkeley. By the late 1980s I was teaching this course at Rutgers University as well, and it was the precursor for the course that I still teach now called the Landscape Lighting Institute (LLI). In 1996, Mark Rea, director of the Lighting Research Center (LRC) at RPI in Troy, N.Y., asked me to bring the course to RPI and it expanded to become an intensive five-day and night course that earns continuing education units.

Later in the winter of 2000, some of the students re-aimed the same fixtures to create a more coordinated effect on the forest face. The slight color difference between MR16 halogen lamps and the metal halide lamps allow the path to still show up clearly.

Intensive Sessions

The format that we developed includes in-class instruction, workshop sessions, and four nights of on-site mockups using the wealth of equipment donated by all the major landscape lighting equipment and lamp manufacturers. The RPI president’s estate served as the first site and later moved to the provost’s estate.

During the years that the course was sponsored by RPI, LRC graduate students simultaneously designed and installed mockups at Dog Park — some we left up for an entire year to study garden evolution issues.

Also, simultaneously, I was teaching similar courses at various universities and for various professional organizations throughout the world- including for the Department of Lighting Studies, Jonkoping University, Jonkoping Sweden, Kwantlin University in Vancouver, Canada, and for the IALD in several cities in Australia.

In 2002, garden development and evolution caused changes in how the LRC masters candidate students evaluated the lighting needs. This image shows some of the same plantings, but all lit with low voltage sources. They revealed the pond by grazing the reeds that had not been cut down that season.

In 2006, LLI officially moved to Dog Park in Brunswick, N.Y., an almost six-acre garden about 20 minutes from the Albany, N.Y. airport. Each course consists of 12 professional attendees with three spots being reserved for design students (landscape, horticulture, interior design, architecture, lighting….).

The past two years, we offered the course once a year, in October, the most beautiful time of the year in NY with the brilliance of fall color on the trees!

The LRC masters candidate students in 1999 selected two groups of plantings around the pond. On the left, the west side of the pond, they used a combination of standard and low voltage floods and accent fixtures to individually treat the varying shrubs and trees, visually presenting the planting group as one element of the overall composition. They left dark areas to separate the two groups of plantings, which they also lit with different sources. The ash trees and Colorado blue spruce (right) were lit with a combination of spot and flood 35-watt ceramic metal halide lamps. To give a sense of depth and a hint of the form of the pond, they floated candles in the pond. The candle detail produced dramatic reflections in the pond.

New This Year

This year, however, the response was so strong that we are thinking of offering two courses back-to-back this October. The definite first course dates are Friday Oct. 3 through Tuesday Oct. 7, with an arrival dinner on Thursday Oct. 2.

The attendees receive a plan of Dog Park with all the mockup areas identified. Teams of two to four people, maximum of six teams, pick an area for their design. Once they have selected an area, the teams interview the “client” to understand the clients’ needs and establish project goals.

This past fall at the Landscape Lighting Institute, Gean Tremaine and Rick Dekeyser used a combination of sources to present a soft view across the pond. They located fixtures on the east side of the pond and aimed them across the pond to show the shoreline. That visual line grounds the plantings, shows the pond curvature and provides a bridge to the reflections. Note all the silhouetted people enjoying the view.

Mockup

The first afternoon we start the mockup by setting up equipment from their kit, preparing to test lamps that evening. The purpose of starting with lamps is to familiarize them with the light sources, since it is the lamp that creates the effects. They make notes about candlepower and beam-spread issues, and what they like and don’t like about the wide range of lamps they will have to choose from when working on real client projects.

The pond area shows how the 2002 students created an encompassing treatment of the plantings at the west and north sides of the pond.

The team kit consists of three road cases, including lamp sets by lamp category (incandescent, fluorescent, and metal halide) for this initial testing, and fixtures, transformers, LV cables with quick-disconnect ends, extension cords and tool boxes, including digital voltage testers in three “road cases” — like rock musicians use for their equipment. The fixture selection in this kit includes well over 100 low-voltage MR 16 fixtures along with representative examples from each of the donating manufacturers.

The second day, the groups start discussing their design ideas and pulling equipment from their cases, and from the rest of the equipment inventory. They make notes about their various ideas before starting to refine their designs, which they mockup and present to the other groups, the faculty, and guests on the fourth night.

The 1999 master candidates students at LRC chose to render this Colorado blue spruce as an exclamation point in the garden. Using a combination of 35-watt ceramic metal halide spot and floods they show some of the trees form, but not all, and accentuated the trees blue color.

Using 20 and 35-watt MR16 lamps, the LRC students in 2000 created a more complete view of the blue spruce. They chose not to enhance the blue of the foliage as the students did in 1999, for the tree to blend in more with the other visual elements. This softened the birches, showing more dimensions and integrated the view across the back of the pond by incorporating more plantings such as the conifers at the very left of this image.

Test and Crystallize

As their designs crystallize, they start the documentation of the design that is so critical in all landscape lighting projects, for the initial installation, of course, but primarily for maintenance over the life of the garden. Each team prepares a layout plan showing fixture location and aiming, including the lamp that gets installed into each fixture, which transformer and control group the fixture is connected into, and as much site landscape information as they believe will aid the installation and maintenance.

The teams plan their power distribution and test it with their volt-meter throughout their area. As they are setting up their system they make notes so that they can prepare fixture, transformer, and control schedules. At the end of the course all the drawings and schedules get updated. The attendees take home these documents along with photos of their area for integrating all these ideas into their real-world projects.

In 2007, Landscape Lighting Institute students Jessica Stanley and Nathan McCartney took a very different approach in creating a form for the blue spruce. Seen from the opposite side for the first time, again due to garden development and site useage evolution, they grazed the branch tips creating the trees’ form and showing its texture. They went back to the metal halide source, but used the 20-watt MR16 lamps. The birch trees on the right and the fruit trees on the left in the distance frame the tree and bring your eye back to the ground.

I lead the instruction, but my own perspective is augmented by further technical and in-field information and demonstrations by Don Bradley, a brilliant electrical contractor that has worked on jobs with me world-wide for about seven years.

Dr. David Brearey joins the instruction team from Maine, sharing his unsurpassed knowledge of pruning plantings for landscape lighting both in class-room lectures and on-site demonstrations.

In 2004, Michael Myer, another LRC graduate student, used more fixtures around the canopy to show its overall three-dimensional form.

George Gruel shares his extensive knowledge, experience and incredible design-eye with the students through lectures on photography and on-site photos of mockups that the instructors set up with each group’s designs…sending the attendees home with photos of their achievements and a website of all that year’s projects, plus mockups of past years.

This mulberry has a very graceful branching structure in its dormant winter appearance. 2002 LRC students lit the tree from the front only with four low voltage fixtures revealing the overall canopy form and visually tieing the tree to the ground by locating one of the fixtures with a 20-watt lamp near the trunk.

This past fall, Dr. David Breary presented to the class the importance of considering pruning on specimen trees. His mockup here shows the final composition, with more emphasis on the branching structure, but still showing the overall form with softer light at the edges of the canopy.

One of the ideas that I emphasize in the course is how each designer has unique ideas. The attendees experience their vision and in the classroom see images from other classes of the mockups previously done in their area.

The goal in the end is for all of us to keep learning.

Janet Lennox Moyer is author of The Landscape Lighting Book and an associate editor at LASN.