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When things aren’t going their way, Las Vegas gamblers can toss in their hand, change tables or try their luck at a different game. But what if the rules suddenly change in the middle of the game...and it’s too late to fold or leave the table? That was essentially the situation facing the lighting design team for the $1.9 billion Palazzo Las Vegas hotel and casino, which opened in January 2008.
In 2006, about halfway through construction of the mammoth, 7 million-sq ft, 50-story complex, designers were informed that The Palazzo was to be registered as a USGBC LEED project. (Now Silvercertified, it is the largest LEED project in history.) The shift in focus toward LEED forced the lighting team—led by Martin van Koolbergen, a partner with Kaplan Gehring McCarroll (KGM) Architectural Lighting, Los Angeles—to rework major elements of its design which it began back in 2003. The goal was to meet or exceed the ASHRAE/IESNA 90.1-2004 standard in major areas of the facility to help the project earn a LEED point for “optimization of energy performance.”
Complicating matters, says van Koolbergen, was that fixture manufacturing was already underway. “We had to go back to our specifications knowing that the fixtures had already been ordered. For the majority of the project, it was a relamping exercise.”
 That relamping exercise—which encompassed The Palazzo’s “podium” (public spaces and the casino) and the “tower” (including guestrooms and corridors)—led van Koolbergen’s team on a relentless pursuit of watts that could be shaved off the original calculations, without sacrificing the hotel’s architectural appeal. “The revised lighting power densities were designed on a location-by-location basis,” he says. In the most extreme case, the design team went from a “limitless” watts per sq ft allowance for the corridors outside the guestrooms to a mere .5 watts per sq ft. Even the back-of-the house areas went from as high as 1.9 watts per sq ft in some places to .91 across-the-board through the use of energy-saving, long-life fluorescent lamps.
Cove lighting, downlighting, accent lighting and the lamping for decorative fixtures were all revamped. All told, the lighting design is projected to save 3.3 million kWh per year. What follows is a look at selected areas within The Palazzo where the revised lighting design yields significant energy savings.
CASINO
The general circulation area in the casino (excluding the gaming tables area) measures approximately 189,000 sq ft. Energy-efficient lamps were able to trim the 90.1 baseline of 1.7 watts per sq ft to 1.6 watts per sq ft. The main focus in the casino areas was on cove lighting and recessed lighting. “There are a staggering number of coves and recessed lights,” says van Koolbergen. “This is a traditionally designed building with a lot of indirect lighting in every public section.”
• Cove lights. Cove lighting in the casino originally called for neon and cold-cathode sources. The coves were redesigned using LEDs (the Tetra system from GE, which supplied all lamps for the project). “For every cove in the casino, we had to work with the existing cove detail to determine where to put the fixture,” he explains. The sheer amount of fixtures is astounding—literally “miles of LED cove lighting,” Koolbergen notes.
• Recessed downlights. The initial specification for the downlights called for 150-W PAR38 lamps. The redesign switched these to 65- or 90-W halogen IR PAR lamps.
• Decorative fixtures. Pendant-mounted decorative fixtures and wall sconces were converted from 40- or 60-W incandescent lamps to 9- or 11-W screw-base CFLs without affecting the color rendering of surrounding materials. This was achieved “without manipulating the fixtures,” says van Koolbergen. “This was a huge thing. The project is replete with decorative fixtures and many are hand-made.”
Finally, even though the casino floor, itself, was exempt from the 90.1 standard and did not factor into the LEED process, the lighting team did look for ways to slash energy use. For example, recessed accent lights above the gaming tables were switched from 50-W MR16 lamps to 37-W IR lamps.
TOWER
The Palazzo’s 3,066 guestrooms and especially the 615,000 sq ft of corridors outside these rooms proved to be important areas in the lighting redesign.
• Corridors. While the original design had no LPD limit for the corridors, the revised design called for .5 watts per sq ft. “The problem with the corridors was that they are dark brown in color. We needed enough light for safety and a constant light level. We didn’t want it to be very bright at the guestroom doors, but then drop off in between the doors. The solution was to lower everything so there would be an even level of light,” says van Koolbergen. In front of the guestroom doors, 50-W MR16 downlights were swapped out in favor of 20-W MR16 lamps. Wall-mounted decorative sconces in the hallways went from two 60-W incandescent lamps to two 11-W CFL candelabra-base lamps.
• Guestrooms. The Palazzo guestrooms account for 2.8 million sq ft, more than a third of the space within the resort. The LPD for the guestrooms was sliced from 1.1 watts to .86 watts per sq ft, triggering a savings of more than 1.95 million kWh per year. The 50-W MR16 lamps originally specified for the recessed lights were jettisoned for 37-W MR16 IR lamps, with 20-W MR16s used over the beds. As was the case in the casino areas, 40- and 60-W incandescent lamps originally specified for the decorative fixtures gave way to warm white 11-W screw-base CFLs, virtually indistinguishable in color and output from the original lamps.
“The biggest challenge was convincing the client, Las Vegas Sands Corp., and the interior designer that energy-efficient lamps did not disrupt the character and elegance of the rooms,” says van Koolbergen. “The client wanted to walk in and see no difference between the rooms at the Venetian [the sister property next door], which is not a LEED project, and The Palazzo.”
THEATER & RESTAURANT
 KGM was also responsible for the lighting of the Jersey Boys Theatre and the Grand Lux Café. (Other lighting design firms were responsible for additional restaurants at The Palazzo.) The target for the theater was 1.6 watts per sq ft, but no relamping was necessary because design started after the LEED process was already in progress. LED cove lights are used in the lobby and public areas outside doors of the performance venue, while linear fluorescent cove lights serve as emergency lighting. Recessed downlights and in-grade low-voltage uplights equipped with 37-W MR16s were specified.
Although it didn’t factor into the LEED portion of the project, the Grand Lux Café had to meet a .9 watts per sq ft LPD under Las Vegas building code. The café is owned by the Cheesecake Factory and was originally designed under its corporate standard, which called for incandescent lamps. “It’s an old-style restaurant with lots of fixtures and the client wanted the ambiance to really stand out,” says van Koolbergen, who specified dimmable CFL lamps to help approximate the warmth of incandescent. The retrofit of the decorative fixtures allowed the restaurant to maintain the same look as all other Grand Lux Cafés.
DAYLIGHTING
In a city where indoor natural light is a rarity, The Palazzo atrium was outfitted with four massive skylights (one roughly 80-ft wide).
ETC, Middleton, WI, supplied the controls (the Unison system) for the atrium. The Unison system is programmed to save energy through occupancy sensing and daylight harvesting, helping the project earn one LEED point for lighting controls. The downlights run on several different circuits, so the number of circuits that are on can be reduced based on the natural light available.
“The aesthetic challenges are a little different when lighting an interior that already has so much natural light,” says van Koolbergen. “You’re no longer dealing with space as a box. In certain areas, you have to counter the intensity of the natural light and balance it with uplighting and decorative features. At night, the lighting control system has to be balanced to maintain the proper footcandles on the ground to meet emergency standards, deemphasize the ‘black holes’ of the skylights and retain the monumental feeling of the architecture. A lot depended on the use of energy-efficient lamps and sources, and the control system with its dimming capacity.”
Despite the painstaking calculations that went into lamp redesign, van Koolbergen believes the true legacy of the project is that high-end lighting design can coexist with sustainability. “This project is a new benchmark for the industry. It demonstrates that the developer of a major upscale property—on the Strip or elsewhere—can maintain standards for quality, drama and experience and also be an environmental good guy.”
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