Office Building: Daylight & Lighting Design

Work whilst at Foster + Partners

The aim of the design was to create a headquarters destination that combines heritage, quality, and modern workplace standards. It seeks to celebrate the character and historic value of the building located in St James’s Square, through sensitive adaptation. The design seeks to create a high-quality working environment that maximises natural light, provides attractive views, delivering best-in-class work place settings.

The lighting scheme aims to provide the users and visitors alike a comfortable, stimulating, and supportive environment for work and interaction. Lighting approach for the internal areas as well as the internal landscape areas will at all times respect and be considerate of the surroundings.

Daylight drives the lighting concept in order to use as much natural light as possible. For day-to-day operations this would mean daylight harvesting in the form of actively balancing electric light against daylight along the glazed envelope.

Recognising that daylight might not reach all spaces suffi ciently or be relied upon all working hours, our electric lighting design involves constant and automated lighting adjustments in extent of its use and overall brightness in order to reduce perceived levels of contrast and offer signifi cant energy savings from switching certain luminaries off when they are not required for task lighting.

Architect: Foster + Partners

Client: Confi dential