LED Testing & Application  

Curbside Appeal

The Cellophane House exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art allowed visitors to see a future where architecture and lighting are inseparable

BY PAUL TARRICONE

What if residential lighting wasn’t encumbered by the CFL vs. incandescent debate, or wasn’t at the whim of shoppers indiscriminately plucking a bulb off the shelf in a big-box hardware store? Instead, what if residential lighting was actually infused into a home’s architecture? A glimpse into this possibility was recently on display in an outdoor lot to the west of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.
 Cellophane House—part of a recent MoMA exhibit on the modern dwelling that closed in October— was a five-story, transparent prefabricated house illuminated solely by LED sources. One objective of Cellophane House was to collect solar energy through integrated photovoltaic (PV) panels in the building’s envelope, while demonstrating the use of embedded LED light as an element of architecture itself. “Cellophane House is a provocation for how we might live in the future,” explains the project’s lighting designer Brian Stacy of Arup, New York. “The architects (KieranTimberlake Associates, Philadelphia) see LEDs powered by PVs in the building’s skin as the next big leap forward.”
   At this point, the PV-powered house does have an EPCOT, aspirational quality to it. “Is it Jules Verne 2050?” asks Stacy. “In America, it probably is,” but similar technologies are currently being considered for Arup’s projects in Asia, so adoption might not be that far off.
   At MoMA, “the LED sources (from Philips Color Kinetics) were used to create luminous surfaces that emphasize the house’s translucency and architectural features in various intensities and colors,” says Stacy. “Most importantly, we were able to achieve the desired effect in a sustainable and energy-efficient way.” The structure’s entire LED lighting installation consumes just 1.3 watts per sq ft, compared with the average house, which consumes about 1.7 to 2.3 watts per sq ft, including plug loads.

PART OF THE PACKAGE
  Cellophane House also turns the idea of factory-produced housing on its head, in a manner of speaking. “The project shows that a prefab house can go vertical, challenging the perception that all prefabs are boxy and low to the ground,” says Stacy. “It’s a contemporary approach.” Moreover, lighting was not considered an end-of-project add-on as is so often the case in residential construction. The LED systems were part of the prefabricated pieces shipped to MoMA; none of the lighting was installed on site.
   LEDs were used from top to bottom in the Cellophane House. •To provide a visual counterpoint to the house, color-changing LEDs were used to downlight a carport and uplight a rooftop canopy.
•Warm white LED light illuminated the space (kitchen, living room, bedroom) in the middle three floors.
• A glowing plastic staircase had white LEDs (4,100K) embedded into the juncture where the wall meets the stair treads.
• LED downlights replaced conventional MR16 recessed downlights.
• LED uplights were used beneath each translucent floor to create luminous planes.
   Says Stacy, “In a typical house, all wiring and mechanical systems are hidden behind dry wall—an impossibility in a house made of transparent and translucent materials. Because LED systems are compact and free of heat emission, they can be concealed in tight spaces where conventional lights are impractical. Further, the ability to connect up to 100 units on a single circuit makes the task of circuiting a breeze and does not require hidden transformers.”
   Finally, in a tail-wagging-the-dog moment that is almost unheard of in residential construction, the lighting design actually affected some structural decisions. For example, to accommodate the glowing floors, some cross-framing for these floors had to be moved. In addition, the stairs had to be redesigned to accommodate the LED unit in each riser.
   A future where lighting influences structural engineering? That’s something many in the lighting community would want to see.