World Architecture - Architectural Landscape Lighting

Architectural landscape lights should work to unite the manmade and the natural in a manner that is compliant with regulatory codes and affordable for your clients. While landscape lighting represents a focus on illuminating and magnifying points of interest in the natural scenery, architectural landscape lighting creates the sense that buildings and technology are in harmony with Nature and establishes a more unified presentation to anyone viewing the facility at night.

Developing an architectural landscape lighting system that will remain true to this intention without costing additional money down the line requires a great deal of planning and research. You will have to determine all the necessary photometric requirements of the system, locate specification grade equipment made in the United States by manufacturers who emphasize quality over quantity, and be willing to use pioneering technologies that many of your clients may not yet understand, but can quickly be educated in if you can just find the time and resources to show them all the benefits you can bring to their table.

For example, one of the most costly components in any architectural landscape lighting system has always been any type of incandescent luminaire, such as a quartz floodlight, that consumes too much electricity in comparison to the light it produces. Not only does this waste money, it violates recent dark sky laws in most places, and it also results in ongoing replacement costs as they fixtures inevitably burn out. Newer fixtures that rely upon electronically ballasted fluorescent lamps, improved HID sources, and now LED light bars deliver a better quality of lighting and comply fully with the recent crackdown on light pollution.

By investing now in specification grade architectural landscape lights, you can save your clients money on excessive energy bills and help them avoid a possible parts shortage that could hit those who wait until the last minute to replace mercury vapor and incandescent lamps. Instead, propose to them architectural landscape lights that feature fluorescent lamps and ballast controls with superb CRI, LED's that can save as much as 80% on power consumption, and HIDs featuring higher than ever LPW efficiency rating, you generate savings that translates into ROI and recession proofing the Spartan budgets of a very cautious and somewhat nervous customer base. You can do this too without sacrificing the visual component of the system as well. Our new generation of architectural landscape lights not only performs better than the previous generation of technology, but it actually features more attractive, diversified and decorative fixture housings in a variety of fixture housings and finishes heretofore unimagined.

RLLD Commercial Lighting's inventory includes everything from decorative fluorescent bollards, post mounted lights, LED Street lighting for industrial parkways and private thoroughfares, super energy saving low voltage landscape lights of every variety, and HID floodlights that can output more light with less energy than ever. All of our lighting fixtures, without exception, are made by world-class US manufacturers who produce them in domestic factories located within our borders. Because our sources are exclusively American, we ensure both quality and compliance and also pass on manufacturers' warranties unavailable to cheaper parts procured from overseas channels.

One additional benefit we deliver to both small and large companies alike is supportive, adjunct lighting design services with every purchase of architectural landscape light fixtures. We have invested a great deal of money in proprietary lighting design software that enables us to calculate the precise photometric requirements for optimal foot candle density and directional lighting control that you need to build a truly winning proposal. By nailing down the technical and regulatory details first, we can then help you focus on finding fixtures and accessories that add aesthetic value to your client's location. This in turn enables you to creating an architectural landscape lighting system that is customized to the exact parameters of your client's site and guaranteed to perform reliably with a minimum of maintenance for years to come.

Architectural Lighting | World Architecture

In today's marketplace, general contractors, electricians and property managers are routinely engaged in competitive bidding on commercial construction and architectural lighting projects. Working with a commercial lighting distributor who specializes in architectural lighting and who represents multiple manufacturers, gives the commercial designer more freedom to bid specific items without fear of limited options, restriction to only one or two manufacturers, or equipment that fails to meet all necessary safety and light pollution regulatory codes.

Architecture lighting specialists will help you carefully balance the major considerations of safety, security, aesthetics, and regulatory code compliance by helping you precisely match fixtures to exact client specifications, and by accessorizing your system to remain as maintenance free and energy efficient as possible. Extensive planning and consultation with a specialist can be obtained at a small, reasonable fee if your team requires assistance with advance planning or ongoing consultation in developing the specifics of your proposal.

Architectural Area Lighting

Architectural area lights are heavily regulated due to their high lumens output and must illuminate only the intended area(s) without generating light pollution that will create a hazard or a nuisance to a nearby business or residence. It is generally advisable that you plan a proposed architectural area lighting system with specific guidance in the following general areas:

1. Parking lot lighting must meet local foot-candle minimums, minimize glare for motorists, and avoid shining lights into adjacent facilities. Working with a source that can accommodate the Spartan preferences of strictly industrial sites and the more decorative needs of municipalities, corporate headquarters, and hospitality clients can go a long way toward impressive line items that can tip a bidding war in your favor.

2. Parking garage lights must be configured in such a way as to balance vertical foot-candle intensity with horizontal foot candle intensity. This often requires working with a specialist who can input the dimensions of your garage into special software to help you determine which lamps, wattage outputs, and light fixture locations are required to achieve optimal, safe lighting levels in your garage.

3. Outdoor building lights must accent architecture without overpowering it. Different buildings may require anything from wall mounted architectural lights, canopy lights, and wall packs in a wide range of size, voltage, wattage, and color options.

4. Security lights of some sort should always be installed whenever architectural patterns vary or diverge and shadows form under eaves, canopies, walkways, or connecting structures can serve as a hiding place for criminal mischief.

Oftentimes, contractors are hired by offices, churches, municipal buildings, institutions, hotels, restaurants, resorts, and country clubs that require a highly customizes architectural lighting system that will speak to all the many considerations that contractors must factor into developing a truly effective outdoor lighting presentation. These clients often have tight budgets both for equipment and for power requirements, so it is necessary as well to have a wide range of line and low voltage options ready to offer the client at the line item level to make the invoice legally compliant with dark sky and foot candle regulations, practical safety and security concerns, decorative needs, and cost effectiveness through reduced power requirements and minimal long-term benefits.

In these situations, both pre-packaged kits and highly specialized architectural lighting equipment can often tip the balance in favor of a truly comprehensive architectural lighting design that goes beyond the basic cornerstone elements of standard configurations.

Sign and Building Edifice Lighting

Sign lighting can set the tone for the entire site's lighting system and help your clients more effectively brand their facility. Larger buildings that feature the company brand or logo painted on the building wall itself can be lit with specialty edifice lighting fixtures that will highlight colors and lettering without creating light pollution for surrounding areas. Flagpole lights can be installed very cost effectively to showcase a client's patriotism and keynote an important element of the landscape in general.

Architectural Landscape Lights

Architectural landscape lighting delivers a more robust illumination to larger campuses with a great deal of area between the property line and primary structure(s). Certain landscape features such as waterworks, decorative sculptures, outdoor break facilities, and recreational areas can be highlighted in such a way as to compliment the architecture of the main building.

Some commercial lighting vendors, such as Easy Rack in Houston, Texas, furnish architectural landscape lighting kits and specialized landscape and building exterior lighting fixtures appropriate for more high-end projects such as resort hotels, five star restaurants, country clubs, and outdoor recreational facilities.

Architectural Area Lighting

Architectural area lights feature an aesthetic component that differentiates them from the purely functional fixtures used in typical site lighting. Although the lamps used in both architectural area lighting and site lighting are often similar--if not identical-- light sources, architectural area lights are made with a noticeably higher level of decorative design and ornamentation. As such, purchasing costs can be rather high, and this can deter municipalities, academic institutions, and even small corporations from making an investment that would otherwise serve their outdoor lighting needs on a number of levels ranging from public appeal to commercial branding. When commercial site developers, architects, and contractors encounter this type of resistance, they can turn to Commercial Lighting for adjunct lighting design support that will enable them to propose cost-effective, energy saving light sourcing that offers both tangible benefits and ROI on multiple levels.

Contractors frequently encounter office buildings, churches, museums, civic centers, municipal headquarters, universities, restaurants, resorts, and country clubs that require a highly customized, often very sophisticated architectural area lighting system that will contribute certain key elements to their property, building architecture, and public image. The fixtures and lamps that will ultimately be used to build these systems must completely accommodate the multiple demands of dark sky laws, increasingly strict LPW efficiency codes, minimum foot candle requirements, and bring the client measurable ROI through reduced power requirements and minimized ongoing maintenance.

If you are a commercial developer or sole proprietor working as a DIY electrical contractor, you can quickly and accurately accommodate these many demands in an expeditious manner is to work with a vendor like Commercial Lighting that offers complimentary, adjunct design services with a systematic approach. Before we suggest any specific lamps or fixtures, we first want to learn more specifics from you regarding your client's site. When we understand architectural area lighting to actually be a combination of four separate elements- parking lot lighting, parking garage lighting, building architectural lighting, and security lighting- the right questions to ask become readily apparent. Does your client have a parking lot, a parking garage, or both? What is the total number of buildings located on the property? Are there public park areas, open landscapes, recreational areas, or walkways that require special lighting? How many people work or visit the facility at night? What is the total acreage of the property if it is located on a considerably large piece of land? How much light will the entire system output, what it will cost, and what will be the expected return on investment for your client?

The data gathered from this dialogue is now inputted into sophisticated lighting design software that enables us to calculate on a point by point level the exact photometric requirements needed to determine which specific fixtures will best provide building accent light, perimeter and walkway security, glare free, well-lit parking areas, and aesthetic, shadow-free landscape, and an energy savings package that offers a measurable ROI by means of energy and maintenance cost savings. By eliminating the guesswork from architectural area lighting,

Commercial Lighting helps contractors first determine exactly what lighting levels and power requirements are optimal to propose, and second, which actual products will most effectively and affordably offer clients lasting solutions that are affordable, reliable, and aesthetically superior. By giving smaller design firms and individual lighting design consultants access to software normally affordable only to larger firms, Commercial Lighting also helps level the lighting design playing field, arming small companies and consultants with competitive advantages that can rival even the largest firms in photometric accuracy, specification grade quality, and multiple benefits at the line item level.

Commercial Lighting maintains a full selection of architectural area lighting fixtures, lamping options, commercial lighting poles, and mounting accessories that allow the contractor to offer more options to the client at the line item level. As a representative of a number of reputable, domestic, and established manufacturers, we can offer any commercial developer, architect, or lighting designer impeccable lead time on products made here in the United States and drop shipped anywhere in the country to expedite time to market delivery of products and services.

Architectural Lighting Design

To stay on top of today's increasingly regulated and competitive marketplace of architectural lighting design, you must focus on service beyond customer service. This may sound like an odd thing to say if you are a contractor who takes pride in exceeding client expectations and relies on customer service to win bids. Hear us out for a moment and consider this point of view as well: your service alone to the client will end when the system is finished, and the client will probably hope that you will not have to return with a labor invoice for additional service fees for maintenance and replacements. The type of service they are looking for comes not so much from you (although courtesy and professionalism are always a given in business), but rather equipment and solutions that serve them every evening when the doors close and the lights come on.

A system developed along these principles of architectural lighting design is something of an intuitive beast that anticipates expectations on two levels. On one level, it reliably performs without mishap on a consistent basis in accordance with how it is intended to perform. On an entirely different level, superior architectural lighting design anticipates increasingly strict government regulations that increasingly mandate more green technology both in terms of power costs and material builds associated with equipment manufacture.

To be a leader in architectural lighting design, you have to think ahead, and you have to install equipment that in spite of its lack of "thinking" ability, behaves as though it can think and satisfies both the client and surrounding community with performance above and beyond what is generally expected.

To create this level of excellence, you must take either take extraordinary measures to design an architectural lighting system or work with an exceptional vendor who can offer you some unique and very proprietary support services. Architectural lighting design on the scale that we are talking about requires investing in very expensive software that many smaller companies and freelance contractors simply cannot afford, but desperately require nonetheless to develop site lighting and exterior lighting proposals that simultaneously speak to cost consciousness, governing authorities, employee morale, branding and advertising, and power conservation. Without tools such as this to work out all the math and angles of incidence necessary to determine wattage, voltage, foot candle densities, required LPW, and CRI index, finding the right industrial lighting fixtures for the system at a price your clients can afford and still make you a profit can be like searching for a needle in a haystack in today's online marketplace of foreign manufactured goods, inflated promises, and endless discount offers on shortcut engineering that costs more money in the long run that it saves in the short term.

Consider instead the benefits of working with a vendor like us who has already spent the money on architectural lighting design software so you won't have to, and who will offer its full functionality to any client at no additional costs to the price of the equipment you buy. If you are a small, privately owned business, you can now compete with large architectural firms and lighting designer powerhouses that previously outcompeted because they had access to resources you lacked. If you are a larger company considering purchasing a suite of programs that will then requiring expanding your staff in a time of cutbacks and recession, don't. Let our staff assist you with the process of turning conceptual, intuitive architectural lighting design into a scientific, mathematically sound schematic of the actual hardware to be used and the recommended positions of every fixture and lamp in the system.

Not only will such a partnership save you time by streamlining the proposal development process, but it will also make your line items more precisely targeted toward the long term objectives of energy code compliance, reduced maintenance and replacement costs, light pollution control, and optimal aesthetic compliments that any client can justifiably and reasonably expect from their investment in architectural lights. When all of these variables are correctly factored into the lighting design equation, the outcome promises reliable service, a compliment to operations and aesthetics, and multiple sources of ROI ranging from savings on power bills to an increase in business resulting from a safer work environment and a more attractive face to the business world.