Building Facade Lighting Design

Problems in Building Facade Lighting Design

Only based on light brightness

Building facade lighting is one of the main forms of urban night lighting. Building lighting at night emphasizes an attractive visual effect that is completely different from the sunlight during the day. Sometimes in order to achieve this attractive visual effect, some designers will adopt the concept of “the brighter the light, the better”.

However, this kind of unreasonable night scene lighting will produce a lot of energy consumption and light pollution, so we must think and study more about the electricity consumption and safety in building facade lighting.

Only rely on lighting technology theory

In the 21st century, many theoretical textbooks on architectural lighting have been published in various countries. These theories provide more theoretical basis for the development of lighting technology. However, only from the perspective of lighting technology or relying on illuminance calculation, lamp parameters, and simple research on human vision, the design of building facade lighting still has a certain one-sidedness.

A city’s architectural lighting effects must reflect the city’s individual characteristics. For cities with different regional environments and historical cultures, the design of architectural lighting should focus on its geography, history, culture and other factors, dig out the genes of regional culture, and firmly grasp the image characteristics of a city or lighting object.

As we all know, Venice is a city with brightly lit water sightseeing roads. This is because the architectural lighting is configured with incandescent bulbs with a vertical downward illuminance of about 6 lux at intervals of 20 meters. Most of its light can be cast on the walls of the riverside road, which complements the light from the street window, making people feel very comfortable.

Although incandescent lamps have the disadvantages of short life and low luminous efficiency, they have become a successful example in cities with less street space such as Venice. Such urban planning and design also fully reflects the distinctive urban architectural lighting.

The Lighting Character of Various Buildings Reflects

Chinese architectural lighting

Night scene lighting is a culture and an art. Taking care of the city’s historical and cultural features and architectural artistic features is an extremely important design concept in lighting. Therefore, architectural lighting design should reasonably and effectively express the character of the building and add color to the city according to the different processing methods of architectural art.

1. Roof-focused lighting

An obvious architectural feature of traditional Chinese architecture is its large roof. But after the treatment and decoration of curved surfaces and curves, it will not appear clumsy. Due to the special roof form of traditional Chinese architecture, the night lighting of the roof should be more focused. In this way, the charm of ancient buildings can be expressed. The form and material of the roof, as well as the bright painted decorations on the bucket arch, will have a great impact on the lighting.

If the roof is paved with tiles, a small floodlight can be set up at the cornice to project light upward, or a small floodlight can be set up along the ridge to project light downward. It not only shows the structural beauty of the traditional sloping roof, but also reflects the contour of the roof. It is also possible to use the method of outlining the roof to describe the unique shape essence of the roof. Similarly, the ridge of the roof and some other details can also be expressed locally using small fiber optic lamps.

2. Take the house as the main lighting object

Although the roof form of ancient Chinese buildings is exquisite, the lighting method that only sets the buried light to illuminate the bucket arches and the roof upwards can be used, and the effect of pursuing exquisite outlines and silhouettes shows the subtle beauty of traditional Chinese architectural art. There are also some colonnade buildings, which illuminate the inner wall, so that the outer components form a silhouette effect, which is also full of the artistic conception of Chinese painting.

3. Lighting combined with roof and body

Lighting up the sloping roof and at the same time illuminating the columns or walls of the house is also a way to express traditional Chinese architectural lighting. However, with combined lighting, it is easy to have equal lighting in all parts or all parts of the building are very bright. Therefore, it is necessary to pay attention to the light and dark relationship of architectural lighting.

Lighting is arranged according to the column positions of the bright, second and slightly equal bays of the building, highlighting the rhythm of the column body of the bay and the rich relationship of the bucket arches under the eaves. Lighting enhancement measures can be taken in the bright room to make the upper plaque more conspicuous. Floodlights can also be set on the outside of the building, and the lamps are hidden in the greening of the surrounding environment, and can even be combined with green lighting.

 

European architectural lighting

A large number of European-style buildings are spread all over the world. We should fully consider the relationship between the urban environment and order, while respecting the building itself, we should also pay attention to the overall image of the building.

The lights are arranged according to the repeated columns in the facade modeling of European-style buildings, and the lights are organized by “horizontal three vertical five”, so that the lights can also form multiple sections to illuminate the building and reasonably control the attenuation of the lights. In this way, the complex and rich light and shadow relationship of columns, balconies, windows and other components in European buildings can be highlighted.

In the European-style buildings we have seen, such as the sunset column, the base can be cast according to the position of the underground lamp with asymmetric light distribution. At the same time, it is also possible to use a single light color for lighting design as much as possible.

 

Modern architectural lighting

For modern architecture, mainly according to the individual characteristics of the building, it emphasizes the block surface and volume of the building, and makes full use of the inherent decoration of the building to form light and shadow changes. The commonly used methods of building facade lighting mainly include the following:

1. Flood lighting

Flood lighting refers to a lighting method that installs floodlights outside the building and directly illuminates the exterior of the building to make its brightness higher than the brightness of the surrounding environment, and to reshape and decorate the image of the building at night. This lighting method belongs to the basic form of building facade lighting. This lighting effect can not only highlight the image of the building, but also effectively express the shape, three-dimensional effect, material texture and decorative details of the building.

The light sources used for lighting include tungsten halogen lamps, metal halide lamps, and LED lamps. The lamps used are special large-scale flood light lamps. Flood lighting should debug the illuminance or brightness of the facade surface of the illuminated building, so that the building level is clear and the three-dimensional sense is strong and the key parts are highlighted, so as to avoid uniform lighting of the entire building.

Flood lighting should choose a reasonable projection direction and angle to avoid vertical projection of the illuminated surface, resulting in a weak three-dimensional sense of building lighting. The installation of light projection equipment should be hidden as much as possible, so that the light can be seen but not the light. For example, the night scene lighting of many buildings such as commercial streets adopts flood lighting. However, in comparison, residential, hospital inpatient departments and glass curtain wall buildings are not suitable for this lighting method.

2. Contour lighting

Contour lighting takes the dark night sky as the background, and places the light source along the shape and decorative details of the illuminated building to outline the outline of the building. It often uses string lights, neon lights, melamine lamps, light guide tubes, full-body light-emitting fiber optic lights, linear lighting and other equipment for lighting.

3. Internal light transmission

Internal lighting is to install the light source in the building and emit light through the glass. Common design methods include indoor light reflection, light strip bracket lighting, and light direct outward lighting. The biggest feature of the design method of translucent lighting in buildings is that while achieving the effect of facade landscape lighting, the use of indoor luminaires saves costs and is easy to maintain.

Internal light-transmitting lighting is often used in commercial or entertainment buildings, especially for glass curtain wall structures. However, due to the light absorption and light transmittance of glass, if external lighting is used, it will not only fail to illuminate the building but also cause a lot of light pollution. And the structure is transparent, and it is difficult to illuminate the upper part of the tower body despite the use of several kilowatts of floodlights.

Later, after research, the internal transmission lighting method was used. Internal light-transmitting lighting lamps are installed at different heights inside the tower body, so that the tower body can be illuminated from bottom to top, forming a magnificent lighting effect, which has become a landmark building in Paris, France.

Design Principles for Building Facade Lighting

Consistent with aesthetic laws

An excellent painting work must first conform to the laws of aesthetics. The same excellent outdoor architectural lighting works must also conform to the laws of aesthetics. The aesthetic method of buildings is to express the geometric beauty, layering and three-dimensional sense of buildings according to the regular combination of points, lines, surfaces, light and dark, dynamic and static.

For example, point: When the light-emitting points of the optical fiber are evenly arranged on the curved surface and spherical surface of the building, from different angles, the brightness and density of the light-emitting points will be different, forming a three-dimensional sense of the building surface.

Line: When the outline of the building is relatively rich, linear lighting can be used to outline the performance.

Surface: The flat part of the building surface is illuminated by narrow, medium and wide beam floodlights.

At the same time, the difference between the brightness or color of the building and the surrounding environment should be reduced to reflect the harmonious beauty with the surrounding lights. Through the use of elements in these three plane compositions, the lighting effect of the whole building is integrated.

Sometimes the lighting installations around the building will adversely affect pedestrians and the surrounding environment. Aesthetic principles can be applied to the design of lamps, and lamps can be designed into elegant shapes. At the same time, under the premise of avoiding affecting the normal growth of plants and facilitating maintenance and management, it is hidden in the branches and leaves of large trees, so that it can become a beautiful small landscape during the day and night.

For example, the Sydney coast installed a post light with a 600mm diameter spherical transparent lampshade with a built-in polycarbonate reflector that reflects light to the ground. The extremely transparent lampshade makes it almost invisible during the day. It is only in the morning and evening when the sun is hanging in the sky that the golden color will appear on the lampshade.

Reduce glare interference

In order to reflect the lighting decoration effect of modern society, many buildings have used a lot of lights in the artistic treatment of night scene lighting. However, due to the installation position, height and projection direction of the lamps, glare may be formed, which affects people’s normal nighttime rest, and also increases social security risks.

Therefore, it is necessary to debug the lamp position, projection angle and projection direction of the lamps. This kind of debugging generally adopts the way of projecting light from bottom to top and from outside to the building. The purpose of projecting light from bottom to top is to scatter the influence of glare in the air, reducing the influence rate of glare on pedestrians and vehicles on the street. When projecting light from the outside to the building, the boundary of the building should be shading, so as not to affect the lighting of the surrounding buildings.

Therefore, the layout should be comprehensively considered in the design scheme and appropriate measures should be taken to avoid it. We walk in a safe light environment society, which can reflect the interaction between people and lights, both materially and psychologically.

 

Energy saving and environmental protection design principles

Many building facades mostly use high-power, high-brightness lighting, resulting in excessive electricity consumption. Therefore, energy-saving issues must be considered when designing lighting in buildings, and high-quality energy-saving light sources, lamps and equipment with long life and high luminous efficiency should be used as much as possible, such as LED, optical fiber and solar photovoltaic lighting.

With the continuous improvement of the economic level of various places, the proportion of places using LED light sources will gradually increase. First of all, LED light source has the advantage of small size, which is easier to hide in building components. Secondly, the life of the LED light source is relatively long, which ensures that the lamp can be maintenance-free for a long time.

In addition, LEDs also have the advantage of low power consumption. The use of LED light source is not only to replace the traditional light source, but also to use its unique characteristics to create its own lighting design and construction scheme. Now, the solar photovoltaic technology has also attracted great attention in the world lighting, so the battery technology meets the coefficient of anti-hail, lightning strike and weathering, and ensures the safety of the building.