GE Lighting Honors Lighting Design Achievement

CLEVELAND — GE Lighting, headquartered in Cleveland, recently honored a team of architects for their lighting design at Square Inc., a mobile payments startup company that is based in San Francisco.

The 2014 GE Edison Award was presented to Claudio Ramos, Hiram Banks, Erin Sudderth and Matt Landl of Banks Ramos Architectural Lighting Design for lighting Square Inc. The project also received an award for environmental design, reflecting energy efficiency and environmentally sensitive design. This is the third time since this award was first instituted in the 2002 competition that a project has received both these honors.

The new headquarters for Square Inc., is designed to be open and collaborative. With 175,000 square feet of useable space that spans the length of an entire city block, the design team’s challenge was to make the space feel hospitable while accommodating future growth and expansion. The goal was to create an office interior that reflects modern and functional design. Lighting plays an important role in establishing way-finding, defining "communities" within the space and providing the feeling of daylight throughout the floor plate.

By using a variety of high-performance fluorescent and LED solutions, Banks Ramos was able to reduce lamp quantity and energy usage. General lighting throughout the open-office area and team rooms is provided by GE 21-watt and 28-watt T5 fluorescent lamps. Linear suspended pendants with dimmable LEDs light up the main building corridor, and continue through floating wood ceiling slats, which also conceal GE 7-watt LED MR16 lamps that illuminate art and signage. An upper level dining area, commercial kitchen and servery are illuminated with 12-foot dimmable T5 fluorescent pendants and continuous LED track lighting, again detailed within a floating wood ceiling.

Daylight harvesting reduces electric lighting consumption to 65 percent in open office areas during bright daytimes. The lighting power density is .64 watts per square foot, 29 percent below American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) standards throughout the entire project to ensure LEED Gold certification.

"The Square Inc. Headquarters project proves that elegant, modern lighting doesn’t need to mean high energy and maintenance costs," said Mary Beth Gotti, manager, GE Lighting & Electrical Institute, in a statement. "Smart lighting design helps to achieve an ambience that is inspiring yet inviting, and also means the office will remain an environmentally friendly space, even as the company grows."

GE Lighting sponsors the annual GE Edison Award competition to recognize excellence and quality in professional lighting designs that employ significant use of GE Lighting Products, including, GE LED systems, LED luminaires, LED lamps and modules, LED architectural products, lighting controls and non-LED lamps and luminaires. Projects must be completed within the prior two years.

A panel of five judges selected this year’s winning entry for its superiority in the following categories: functional excellence; architectural compatibility; effective use of state-of-the-art lighting products and techniques; appropriate color, form and texture revelation; energy effectiveness; and cost effectiveness.