Lisa Passamonte Green is a partner and principal designer for Visual Terrain, Inc., a Los Angeles-based lighting design firm with offices in Connecticut, Dubai and China.

Q. For those people who don’t know: What is a lighting designer? Where do they belong on a project team?
A. We design and specify the lighting equipment and gear for the public- or guest-visible spaces in a project, whether it’s a ride, building, restaurant, museum, or retail store. We’re responsible for the visual quality of the guest experience. We marry the functionality with the aesthetics of a space and are responsible for programming the lighting to tell the story of the attraction, exhibit or space.

Ideally, lighting designers should be brought into a project during “Blue Sky” or early feasibility studies. Typically, we’re not brought in until Schematic or Concept Design phases. Sometimes, we’re not brought in until Design Development. I think the earlier we’re engaged, the more value we bring to the overall success of a project. By working with concept and schematic teams, we can determine lighting budgets and early design concepts so everyone moves into DD under the same impression of what the lighting could be. I would be so bold as to say: It is so valuable to be brought in early, that whatever a client perceives us to cost during those phases, I believe we are able to save over the life of the project.

For example, our idea of how a scenic element will be lit might affect how it is constructed. I once worked on a project where the client requested a lot of detail work on a scenic piece without our knowing it; the scenic company put in a lot of overtime to achieve the request. However, the piece was installed in a relatively dark scene, dramatically up-lit at oblique angles to seem scarier, so very little detail was visible. If we’d been fully involved in that design discussion, we could have saved the scenic company time and the client a lot of money.

Q. Is technology changing the way you work?
A. Lighting design has always been a marriage of science and art. I don’t think the line between technology and design is blurring, but the technology is becoming more complex. There are more tools than ever before.

The medium is still light; it’s just coming from different sources.

For example, there are myriad ways to use and control LEDs — I can address individual LEDs in an array, or I can address the entire array as a single control channel — but I still have to figure out the design. There is just more technology to track throughout the design.

Q. Has LED or projector technology changed the role of the lighting designer on projects?
A. With video-driven LED systems or projector systems, where the lighting designer becomes involved in the creation of the content, our role has expanded. It has become more of a collaboration between the client and the lighting designer for what the content is, and how it is used and maintained over the lifetime of the project. Often lighting designers are done when our projects open; but being responsible for content, which may change or be updated over the lifetime of the project requires us to have an ongoing relationship with the project owner.

LEDs continue to evolve, and what’s nice is we are seeing more companies able to harness the optics of LEDs, managing the distribution pattern of the LED fixtures better now than ever before. They are also managing the color consistencies better through improved production techniques.

Q. Can you talk a little bit about the state of projection and how the new, high-tech projectors that are being used for lighting are affecting your work?
A. Since many new projectors are server-driven, it gives us greater flexibility for using images in any location, because we can map them to any shape; the technology gives us the ability to correct for the distortion caused by projecting at an angle to the projection surface. That said, as a lighting designer, often the projection systems are not in our scope of work. When we choose to use a projector, we feel it is incumbent upon us to understand the owner/operator’s ability to maintain that projector system.

Q. Talk about the high-tech products in Visual Terrain’s recent projects.
A. Harrah’s Chester Casino and Racetrack just opened in Chester, Pennsylvania. We use LEDs in a variety of different ways. We have a video-driven LED wall by Element Labs above the porte cochere, using their Versatube product. We also have various color-changing LED coves from Advanced Lighting Systems throughout the interior of the event center, which we selected because their small profile could fit a shallow cove. Also, on the exterior we used single-color, red LEDs from iLight to outline the building and porte cochere similarly to how neon would have been used in the past. The advantage is that LEDs are a low-voltage system, where neon would have been a high-voltage system. And it’s visible from five miles away!

We also used an Element Labs system in Dubai Festival City, on five automotive showrooms. There, we used the Versatube system as trim on each façade, with a single-color signal giving each showroom its own color. We used Versatube because it could handle the extreme heat of Dubai. LEDs in Dubai are really tricky: The systems have to be able to turn on after being in the extreme heat of the sun all day. The operating temperature could be as high as 60°C (140°F)! In addition to the Versatube strips, we accented the architecture using TIR’s Destiny CV and Destiny
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