Going forward, Mehl believes there will be an even greater need for designers who are technically savvy and can handle the myriad codes and regulations. “Energy code review, and lighting and energy analysis is a major component of a lighting designer’s work these days,” Margulies says. The need to know how to do this work is leading to, as Mehl observes, the extension of the design and technical services package that design groups in engineering offices can offer including energy certification and evaluation.
DEVELOPING STANDARDS At Cosentini, Margulies had the opportunity to develop the lighting group over the course of 25 years. When he started, right out of school in the early 1980s, the lighting group was there to support the needs of the engineering firm. Both a blessing and a curse, being so accessible to colleagues to answer questions was part of why Margulies was instrumental in developing standards for lighting equipment, control, and energy codes that could be used firm wide. The creation of standards allowed him to “distance himself from the day-to-day engineering tasks.” As a result, he could devote more of his time to building the lighting consultancy as its own separate entity and pursuing design projects. “There was a really clearly defined scope of work,” he says. “The development of the standards was welcomed by the engineers who need an order to do their work.”
ACCESS TO ARCHITECTS AND CLIENTS Another benefit of working for a large firm is the access it can afford a young designer to work with some of the world’s leading architects. Margulies was able to work with many greats including Kevin Roche. That exposure to a cadre of architects and to a scale and caliber of projects allowed him to build his skill set and win the respect of these architects. Margulies, wanting at this point in his career to be his own boss, has since left Cosentini to open his own practice—One Lux Studio in New York—but he is fully aware of the foundation his Cosentini experience gave him. “I never would have gotten this experience if I hadn’t worked in an engineering office,” Margulies says.
Brett Malak, who stepped into Margulies’ position, makes a similar observation. “You gain a tremendous amount of knowledge,” she says. “And along with the amount of responsibility, it expands your skill set as a designer. You have to factor everything at once.”
PRACTICE FOR THE FUTURE? “Pursuing work outside the MEP umbrella can be challenging at times,” Plumpton says. “You have to find the best fit for the design group and the larger office.” This multilayered approach to design should not be misunderstood as “one-stop shopping,” which for Brian Stacy, who leads Arup’s lighting group at the firm’s New York office, implies some sort of a commodity service, which design is not. “The immediacy of these integrated approaches offers a different kind of analysis and project development,” Stacy says. “The level of interaction between colleagues demands great attention to detail.” And should problems arise on a project, the ability to communicate across disciplines “avoids the situation of finger pointing,” Plumpton notes.
The complexities of architecture, engineering, and lighting design services continue to expand as practice must meet the rigors of client expectations, economy, and codes. Practicing lighting design in an engineering context offers a solution to address the expanding scope of a lighting designer’s work and should not be dismissed as incapable of meeting the challenges of design. Lighting design as practiced by engineering firms such as Arup, Cosentini Associates, JB&B, and Flack + Kurtz shows that the divide often assumed to exist between design and engineering is not that great after all.
