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Book: Lightbook: The Practice of Lighting Design

Staff -- Interior Design, 3/11/2002 1:12:00 PM

reviewed by Stanley Abercrombie

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Lightbook: The Practice of Lighting Design
	Basel: Birkhäuser, distributed by Princeton Architectural Press by Ulrike Brandi and Christoph Geissmar-Brandi 256 pages, 430 illustrations (many in color), CD-ROM; $80.00 Buy at Amazon.com for $56.00.
This may be the most useful lighting book I've ever read. Certainly it is the most handsome, the layout credited to Muriel Comby of Basel. One coauthor is the managing director of the Ulrike Brandi Licht lighting-design firm in Hamburg; the other is a curator and art historian. Together they start by going back to the most basic characteristics of daylight and candlelight, then consider how lighting for buildings, rooms, and exterior spaces can be described in drawings, graphs, models, and computer simulations. Layouts, window shapes, lamp types and placements, and luminaires are all presented clearly. The bulk of the book, however, is devoted to well illustrated and explained case studies, including the lighting of spaces by Rafael Viñoly, Toyo Ito, James Stirling, Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, and many others. Elsewhere, we see lighting on the facade of the Louvre and sunlight through the oculus of the Roman Pantheon. The 32-page glossary gives unusually detailed definitions to lighting terms: The entry for 'moonlight' consists of a poem by Longfellow. A CD-ROM inside the back cover offers a 30-day free trial of light-planning software called LEOS (Light, Energy Optimization, and Service).

Interior Design Magazine, February, 2002
Classification: Lighting

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