Next Gen of Atelier Ten – Lighting

by Mila Robins, Environmental Designer
Read time: 9 minutes

This series began with the environmental designers before covering each letter of our MEP (mechanical, electrical, and public health) team. We have now reached the penultimate edition featuring our lighting designers. If the name didn’t give it away, lighting designers deal with the difficult and beautiful task of illuminating the spaces where we live, work, play, and transition. They deal with different variables in two distinct realms: indoors and outdoors.

Our lighting team sits close to the architectural discipline and can find itself in between the designers and engineers and the architects in many meetings when opinions and strategies conflict. Being an award-winning lighting designer means making the architect, the client, and the future occupants happy, and as always this means optimising for many things all at once. So, without further delay, let’s hear from the source, as I am joined for this edition by Bijin Hameed.

Bijin studied architecture in Bhopal, India, finishing in 2022. During his undergraduate he completed a placement with an architectural practice where the director had a background in lighting, so he found himself working with a special emphasis on lighting. He didn’t plan on going into lighting from architecture, but keeping all doors open, upon graduation, he started with a lighting studio based in London, specialising on high-end retail projects. After two years, of work where he collaborated with Atelier Ten on competitions, he found an opportunity to join our lighting team.

How was the transition to Atelier Ten after a few years of experience in the industry?

My work previously was on a lot of commercial and retail spaces, designing showrooms and such. Here there’s a lot more emphasis on public realm, so I had a learning curve and a lot of new regulations and standards to pick up. Atelier Ten is a smaller lighting team but within a much larger company so I also was adjusting to new culture and work environment. Everyone at Atelier Ten was very welcoming and I found social groups and communities for everything – cycling, tennis, board games, photography, etc.

Tell us about the tools you use.

Rhino. We use Rhino for sure. We also have a dedicated software for lighting simulations called DIAlux, but we have a similar workflow to the environmental team from what I understand. We take the Rhino model from the architect, we simplify it to a basic level and clean up the geometry, then we import it to DIAlux for the simulations. It’s like IES [a software the environmental team uses for energy modelling], where it feels a bit outdated but very powerful. You can even model directly in DIAlux but it’s not the best user interface. I think my background in architecture has helped because I am very familiar with the tools such as Rhino.

What are some of the differences between projects you worked on at your first company versus now Atelier Ten?

Well, public realm projects are a lot larger in scale, and here you must think about external conditions as well. Like I mentioned there were a lot of rules and regulations to pick up quickly. Honestly thanks to AI and ChatGPT, they’ve been a big help, and they didn’t exist when I was first starting out my job. Now you don’t need to disturb your seniors as much. Before I would go through all books, articles, and manuals to pick up design criteria, whereas now I find ChatGPT useful for queries. I will ask it, for example, what the lux requirement is for a certain space, and I will ask it to give me the standard where it found this information and even a page number so I can quickly check it’s correct.

What is driving sustainability in relation to lighting?

There is a lot to do with emerging regulations, for example, in every single project it’s expected that we include LPD (lighting power density) calculations and TM65 (embodied carbon calculations for mechanical and electrical equipment). So, a lot of the stuff has become a requirement, but also given that our lighting team is part of the larger Atelier Ten culture we also put a lot more emphasis on sustainability.

Beyond just meeting the requirements, what more can we do to push sustainability?

This is tough. You hire a lighting designer to make the space look good at the end of the day. The more lights you add to a space and the more contrast you create, the better it will look, but at the same time the more energy you will consume. So doing my job sustainably and responsibly is a careful balance. With LEDs getting more efficient we have seen a huge improvement in the past years, and I think this is a trend that will continue. Also, with requirements and policies getting stricter, manufacturers are responding to the market. We are constantly telling manufacturers if they don’t have an EPD (environmental product declaration) we won’t specify you. This is something Atelier Ten leads in.

Beyond tech advancements like LEDs and further efficiency improvements, is there anything else that could shift the lighting space in a more sustainable direction?

If you look at CAT A (a finished but empty office space) projects where we specify lighting and do a layout, then pass this to the client who then leases the space to a tenant who comes and changes everything based on their own lighting designer – this creates a lot of waste. Since we know from experience how much this happens, we work with manufacturers that will take back light fixtures, refurbish them, and even supply back to the tenant if possible.

Not too long ago the lights we initially specified would have just been stripped out and discarded completely. This is an initiative along the lines of the circular economy. Similarly, if you think about all the different parts to a light, if the chip goes bad you used to replace the whole light, now if the chip goes bad you can replace just the chip. This is better in terms of cost, embodied carbon, waste streams, everything.

What is the biggest barrier to the uptake of these strategies?

For this, cost. Say we specify these manufacturers and lighting fixtures. Then the project goes through a VE process (value engineering). In this period there are a lot of specification changes. We push back as we specify for a reason, however often the whole team goes with the lower cost option, and the scheme gets ‘VE-ed’ down to the cheapest lighting fixtures.

So, do you see this as a problem policy can fix? What must happen to shift the trends?

Mostly I feel it is an awareness thing. The budget should be there for it, and people need to understand that even if the upfront cost is higher, over the lifetime the payback is good, whether that’s through fewer replacements or decreased operating costs. The mindset shift takes time, but policy is definitely a good way to move it.

How would you break down the less obvious differences between internal and external lighting?

So internal lighting is exactly how it sounds, looking at the lighting inside a building, and is mainly focused on aesthetics and meeting minimum requirements. With internal lighting we work a lot with benchmarks and our own experience. Sometimes we know that the minimum required design lux is not optimum, and we design for something higher. External lighting is different – including how we simulate. There are also lots of technical aspects, for example water ratings don’t matter for the inside the way they do for the outside.

What about daylight?

Interior simulations don’t really take into consideration daylight and sun paths as much, unless the space will only be used during the day when there is a decent amount of daylight available, or if there are atrium and other spaces with a lot of interaction with the sun. For public realm (external), we mainly design for nighttime usage of the space because daytime there is no need as it will be fully lit by daylight. It may seem odd, but we can’t rely on the daylight for interior lighting design, we must design for the cloudy days when there may not enough light available naturally. Imagine there is no daylight at all, but you don’t have enough light because you over-relied on daylight in your interior lighting calculations.

Finally, do you have experience working in countries with fewer regulations regarding lighting? Do you feel like there is a correlation with stricter regulation and increased sustainability?

Yeah, I mean India has fewer regulations, and honestly, I think the UK has some of the strictest standards. I personally think it’s good, although even with London you can see all the light pollution especially when flying over the city. Within London even the City of London has separate and additional requirements and guidance given the building stock and density over there. I think people are giving more importance to all this and yes, I think it is a good thing.

End of article 05, next up: graphics

Thank you all for taking the time to read this fifth edition of the series, I hope it was a useful insight to lighting design more generally, but specifically more on the culture and inner workings from the perspective of juniors. If you have any questions at all – around the series, the work, the people, the company, don’t hesitate to reach out to us on LinkedIn.

Next will be our final article of the series, featuring our graphics team.