How lighting can power change: Florence Lam, Arup
Alumna Florence Lam tells us why lighting design is about more than technology.
During her second year studying Engineering at Cambridge University, Florence Lam spent her summer holidays interning at the consultancy Arup in Hong Kong, doing what she describes as “simple calculations” to lay out lighting for a warehouse.
“Someone asked me what I was doing and I said ‘lighting design’ and, as the word ‘design’ came out of my mouth, I realised it couldn’t be, because how we experience light is certainly not just a set of numbers and calculations.”
When Lam graduated and took up a permanent role at Arup in London, she was determined to gain the broader understanding she felt she was missing, and enrolled part-time on the Light and Lighting MSc programme at the UCL Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering (IEDE).
That was 1989, and today Lam is a Fellow and Global Lighting Design Leader at Arup. The course at The Bartlett has a hallowed reputation today – said by some to be a prerequisite for a senior role in the sector. At the time, Lam was attracted by its holistic approach to the field: “It was the only course that covered the full spectrum of what I felt I needed to learn about light and lighting – not just the technological aspects, but the human factors and the art and architectural side of it.”
Lam says that being awarded the Howard Branston Student Lighting Design Education Grant in 1991 was testament to the high professional promise and appreciation of lighting as an art that she gained at The Bartlett. The daylight fundamentals she learned from the course enabled her to develop an Arup in-house computer programme for daylight analysis – which her thesis was based on – and her being awarded a Distinction at the CIBSE Young Lighters of the Year in 1991.
Lam was named the Lighting Designer of the Year at the UK Lighting Design Awards in 2013 and the group she led at Arup named the Lighting Practice of the Year in 2016. Lam was also recipient of the Lighting Award from the Society of Light and Lighting in 2014.
“As lighting designers, we need to understand the wider context behind a project and be totally engaged with how that can be properly integrated into sustainable development of cities,” Lam says. “It’s not just about a technological solution, it needs to be a social solution.”1996, more than a third of the finalists in the Society of Light and Lighting’s prestigious award for Young Lighter of the Year were graduates of the course and, since 2010, it has produced three of its winners.
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