A museum of daylight, the New Acropolis Museum in Athens

Presentation from VELUX Daylight Symposium 2013 in Copenhagen by Florence Lam.

As environmental concerns increase, it is more important than ever to utilise natural light to its fullest in all public spaces, including galleries and museums. When working on the New Acropolis Museum, Arup’s lighting team used daylight as the theme to emphasise and enhance the ancient collection as well as the architecture. Daylight is used as a tool to replicate, as far as possible, the outdoor conditions under which many of the architectural sculptures were originally seen. The use of architectural lighting is kept minimal, playing a complimentary role, and switched on at dusks only. This makes the night time transformation even more dramatic for the visitors and was key in achieving the sustainability agenda of the designers.

Florence Lam is a Director with Arup, an international design and business consulting firm. She leads Arup’s global lighting design practice, and has been responsible on a wide range of creative and well-executed projects all over the world. She believes in Total Architecture solution, in combining lighting creativity with the highly–skilled expertise of Arup’s engineers and environmental specialists, which has a tremendous advantage over the traditional approach to lighting design. Her particular interests in visual perception and natural lighting have played key roles in many of her innovative and sustainable design solution on projects, such as Tate Modern in London, Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, the New Acropolis Museum in Athens, Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and the new California Academy of Sciences Building in San Francisco with Renzo Piano, achieving the platinum rating of the US Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program.