JulAugNewsletter

Women in lightingYLOTY: where are they now?sn Liz PeckI had no idea what I wanted to do when I left school; earlier on,I’d wanted to be a journalist but my English was never reallythat good. Or join the police, but my dodgy heart precluded that.I’d messed up my A-Levels a bit, although later I found out thatmy heart hadn’t been functioning as it should during that time.That’s my excuse anyway.I studied an HND in business and finance at SheffieldHallam, specialising in marketing. I wrote a business plan forMarks and Spencer, which was failing at the time and I still thinkmy tutor must have sold it to them because they followed itvirtually to the letter.I was introduced to the wonderful world of lighting over a pintin The Bull Inn at Newick, Sussex. I’d lost my job and CiaranKiely, then product manager with Concord Lighting and a goodfriend of mine, told me to ring Concord in Newhaven as theyalways needed people in customer service. Soon after I joined,we took over the technical helpline and were dealing withcontractors who really didn’t want technical help from females.I found out what the lighting designers did and thoughtit sounded cool, even though apart from being able to reada cone diagram in the catalogue, my knowledge was zero.Luckily, when I announced I would like to join the lightingdesign team, Concord had just merged with Marlin and I hadan interview with Mike Simpson who, somehow, thought that anenthusiastic rookie was a prospect.I got involved with the SLL through natural evolution. I wentto the symposium in Dublin and Mark Ayers, now managingdirector of Aether Lighting, convinced me to join what was thenthe Newsletter Committee. I’ve loved being involved ever since.It’s such a special society, where the great and the good mixseamlessly with young people and new lighters.Was it a drawback being female? At Concord, it raised theobstinate side of my nature (I think that’s my father’s genes)as I was determined to find out all the answers to technicalqueries and the reason for them. That’s how I found out aboutlighting design, so it’s not such a bad trait sometimes. It’s neverstopped me doing anything I’ve wanted to do. I’ve always beentreated as an equal.I don’t have any dependents so I can pick and choose whatI do with my time to an extent. It’s terribly addictive, of course,and now it’s all-consuming. I was watching tennis once andwas paying more attention to what I thought was terrible lighting(indoor arena) than to the match. I have lighter’s neck fromlooking up every time I go into a building.Lighting can inspire – think of sunrises and rainbows. But mydad was my biggest inspiration. When he was diagnosed withterminal cancer, he stopped work and fulfilled a lifetime dreamof hiking to Base Camp at Mount Everest. The picture is on thewall of my office and reminds me that everything happens fora reason and nothing is unattainable if you really want itenough. I also love never knowing what’s coming next andmaking people smile.n Florence LamWhen leaving school all I knew was that university was the nextdestination, I hadn’t a clue about anything beyond 18. So I wentto the University of Cambridge to study engineering.I discovered lighting design during my summer internshipat Arup after my second undergraduate year. Having beeninvolved with some student theatre productions at university, myinstinct told me that lighting design demanded a more holisticapproach beyond engineering and guided me into doing apostgraduate study at the Bartlett School of Architecture. Thepurpose was to gain a more rounded knowledge and exposureto the architectural and human dimensions of light.Following this, when I had my interview with Arup aftergraduation, I made it quite clear to Bob Venning, who thenheaded that division, that lighting was the area that I wantedto specialise in.I have never found that being female had any drawbacksand I had no problem with work-life balance, especially when Ican actually enjoy life at work – being among a lot of talentedpeople who share a common passion and drive to achieve thebest at what they do.The male:female ratio for lighting at Arup is around 60/40.Naturally there were more men at Arup when I joined 25 yearsago. However, as the business and the services offered atArup become more diverse, I also see an increase in diversitybeyond gender and race among my colleagues.Being a person who is easily inspired, I appreciate thefreedom to do what is right, to pass on the baton and leave alegacy for a better world. To me, lighting design is not an endbut a means to fulfil a greater purpose in life. nPhotogaphy: Kallos Gallery/Steve WakehamLiving daylightIn the second of an occasional series, Stephen Cannon-Brookes looks back to being a YLOTY finalist in 1996The YLOTY competition provided me with an opportunity topresent findings on a study of lighting in the Picasso Museumin Paris. Following its refurbishment I am not sure how muchof the careful system of daylight support from Simuonet’singenious integration of indirect lighting has been swept away.I hope the audience for the finalists has forgotten mysomewhat stumbling address, the judges correctly awardingboth written and delivered papers to my competitors. On theplus side, I found myself welcomed into a supportive communitydriven by an interest in the subject with members of the thenLighting Division of CIBSE encompassing at least six if notseven decades of age groups. I was invited to join the LR&Teditorial board in 1997, my rather more distinguished colleaguesobserving that I had failed to bring the average age below60. Once in the sights of the inestimable secretary JonathanDavid the next step was the council of Lighting Division and, tocomplete the cursus honorum, a year as SLL president in 2006-7. It took longer to find a successor as chair of CIBSE’s DaylightGroup, a post I managed recently to hand over to Prof JohnMardaljevic having spent 10 years in the chair.The topic of my Young Lighter’s paper was closely related tomy then recently completed PhD on the use of scale models inthe quantitative analysis of daylighting in museum galleries. Forthe first half of 1996 I attended endless interviews with practicesjust emerging from a sharp recession with no wish to employ anover-educated 30-year old with zero recent practical experienceand unproven skills. I remember Barrie Wilde sagely telling methat no one would ever make a living out of daylighting.Still entertaining the goal of taking Part III and becominga chartered architect I joined Bickerdike Allen Partners.Designing GP practices did little to excite me, but I soondiscovered that my real job was to help Dr William Allen (Bill toeverybody) in his final career. He had trained as an architect,Kallos Gallery, Davies St, Londonbecome an acoustician, chaired the Architectural Associationand created a practice renowned for its knowledge of buildingscience before deafness encouraged him to take up lighting.In hindsight, until his death three years later, I was privilegedto have a masterclass in becoming a consultant. The otheroutcome of this period was the abandonment of plans tobecome an architect and a gradual translation into full-timelighting. This was accelerated in 1996 by an invitation to teachon the Light and Lighting MSc course at the Bartlett, a 20 percent appointment that I have maintained since then.Somehow my students thankfully didn’t discover that in myfirst year I was barely steps in front of them. I discovered thata PhD equips one with an ability to learn, but not necessarilya breadth of understanding of one’s subject. I took over thedaylighting part of the course. Barrie was right, I wasn’t going toeasily make a living out of it, yet each year I have tried to conveymy enthusiasm as well as an understanding for a field that lacksthe quantitative certainties of most of illuminating engineeringand demands an exploration of intuition and observation.For many years, I sensed my colleagues throughout thelighting industry have anticipated what I will have to say andlabelled it daylight and thus elective rather than essential. It isperhaps no longer a matter of time before we finally abandonhorizontal illuminance as a useful metric for most interiorlighting, and root mean exitance and other tools make a moredirect link to what we actually see. I am not sure I can claimauthorship of the observation ‘the room is the luminaire’, butanyone with a healthy in interest in daylighting understands thisand we are now safely on the way to lighting’s equivalent ofGrand Unification Theory.Before leaving Bickerdike Allen, Bill and myself had beenasked to relight much of the Frick Collection in New Yorkand this set the tone when forming my own independentconsultancy following his death in 1999. I went on to similartasks with the Huntington Gallery in California and then therelighting of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.Each project, large or small, is a new delicate balancing actof visibility, lighting control and integration, often within protectedhistoric buildings. I sense my role is a mixture of hospitalconsultant and medieval master mason. I consider myselffortunate to have been able develop the field of my research.The concept design for the Hermitage extension in StPetersburg provided the opportunity to fully engage withclimate-based daylighting analysis and disseminate this tothe museum world, resulting in yet another chairman’s role,this time the architecture committee of the InternationalCouncil of Museums.It is a particular delight that a major current project is acollaboration with the National Trust and John Mardaljevic tofinally explore the actual daylight performance of interiors in away that was only a dream in the mid-1990s. n10 11