Preface to This Edition
The disruptive technology of LED started infiltrating lighting as early as 2008 — even though development had started many years earlier. It took time for the electronic whizzes and the lighting world, especially the landscape lighting world, to learn how to communicate with one another. In every endeavor, communication is always a key to success.
This has always been true in landscape lighting. Some assume that bringing light to the outside environment is easy. Not true. Landscape lighting has many complications specific to the outdoor environment — such as growth, change of seasons, people making changes, weather, no ceilings! — issues that don’t affect interior lighting.
Over the 36 years that I have been concentrating on landscape lighting, I am not sure that I have ever received a “ complete” planting plan. For sure, there has never been an instance when the planning did not change — during conceptual design, design development, contract documents, planting installation, lighting equipment installation, and, ever after, bringing us back to communication.
In this fast-paced electronic world, where even our phones are outdated within months, it remains the responsibility of the lighting designer to try to keep up with communication — staying in touch with all the players on a project team. In many cases, we don’t even know some of the players or which ones are instrumental in creating the changes that affect aspects of the landscape.
Every chapter in this third edition has new photography, replacing imagery from the first and second editions, providing more visual examples than previously, and, showing updated approaches. Some chapters have been completely reorganized, while others have strategic updates.
The entire Materials and Technology section has been revised. Chapter 6, “Light Sources”, has an entirely new organization. Starting with the “new technology” of LED electronic light sources; explaining/discussing all the issues we need to understand as we either plan a new landscape lighting system or want to integrate LED into existing systems. The “Light Fixtures” chapter discusses the options that we have today, in 2012, with LED, and how utilizing electronics changes the issues we need to think about in project/fixture specification.
The other three chapters: – “ Corrosion, Materials, and Finishes”, “Controls” and “Wiring ”— have been updated as processes have been revised by governmental bodies and addressing how LED sources and the associated electronics affect how we specify and live with new technology.
Landscape lighting continues to grow in this everchanging world, and, offers us a magical environment and reconnection to our garden spaces during the daily hours of darkness.
Janet Lennox Moyer
Brunswick, New York
December 2012
Preface to the First Edition
Landscape lighting offers an incredible expansion of the enjoyment of both residential and commercial properties. It makes outdoor spaces usable at night and adds a magical view into the landscape from interior spaces. However, to produce effective lighting requires skill and thorough planning. After practicing landscape lighting for many years and finding no accessible guidelines to use in learning the problems and process of landscape lighting, I realized that sharing my knowledge in the form of a book would help the lighting industry, including designers of all kinds—landscape architects, architects, interior designers, and lighting designers—as well as contractors and property owners.
Any design project starts by analyzing the needs of a project, so this book starts with a discussion of how to evaluate a project and by familiarizing the reader with both the way people see light and how we, as designers, can introduce light in an organized fashion to create or sculpt a night scene from a dark landscape. The first part of the book ends by examining the process of designing and building a lighting system.
The second part of the book presents enough technical information to allow inexperienced designers, as well as designers familiar with interior lighting, to approach designing a landscape lighting system. Designers need to understand how light sources work and which ones to choose, the important aspects of fixtures and what will allow them to function and last in the harsh outdoor environment, the types of available controls and how to approach planning a control system, and the basics of the wiring system that feeds the fixtures and lamps.
The last two parts of the book examine specific design issues. Part III presents the needs of the three basic types of applications: residential spaces, public spaces, and atriums. Part IV focuses on elements of design that will make up the parts of a landscape: plants, sculptures and structures, paths and stairs, buildings or facades, and water features. Knowing the characteristics and special considerations of these applications and elements helps designers to organize their design concepts and develop a cohesive lighting design.
Some lighting books provide information on lighting basically from a technical viewpoint. I have tried to balance the importance of design and technical information in this book. There are other books that delve more deeply into how light is produced, the nuances of light sources, the chemistry of corrosion and materials or finishes, and lighting calculations. For people who want more information after reading this book, the bibliography at the end of the book lists sources of further information.
Light has the ability to transform a space, creating emotional responses or simply making an environment comfortable. While I love what light does throughout the day and inside buildings at night, the effect that it has on a landscape is special. For me, it is like a gift of additional time to enjoy our surroundings. I hope this book allows you, too, to benefit from this gift.
Janet Lennox Moyer
Berkeley, California
May 1992
Acknowledgments
This second revision for the third edition has been an entirely different experience. One month before the second edition was due at Wiley in 2004, I needed help with art — from someone who really understood Macintosh and had an artistic hand. Mary Anne Davis introduced me to George Gruel. He came over to “help a damsel in distress,” telling me as he entered the door (an hour late) that he doesn’t do this kind of work. George got me through the end of the second edition and changed my life forever. Eighteen months later we were married and he got permanently sucked into The Landscape Lighting Book. He started photographing my work, and other lighting designers’ work. He developed a new technique for rendering landscape lighting allowing us to show clients what is in our minds eye before decisions take us too far down the design path, and, he is doing the entire layout for this third edition — with help from Mary Cutler. The collaboration with George has made this book better beyond my words and my life complete.
The most sweeping content change in this edition encompasses the disruptive technology LED has brought to our industry. Tory Poppenheimer tutored me for nearly a year while I was doing research on how to incorporate this new technology. We both knew that when the book gets published LED will have moved on so Chapters 6, “Light Sources”, and 7, “Light Fixtures”, needed to provide readers’ with a foundation for asking the right questions into the future.
Scores of other people involved in LED technology and fixture development offered me their time and expertise to help me share where we are going including: Steve Landau at Lumileds; Thor Scordelis, John Yriberri, Megan Carroll at Xicato; Michael Riebling , Michael Lehigh, Bill Doron, Paul Dugan, Lew Waltz, Juli Megonnel, and Andrew Lindstrom at Philips-Hadco; Lance Bennett, Chris Bohler, Scott Wegner, Scott Rhodes, Eric Jerger, Jeff Nepple at Cooper Industries; Eric Lind, Russ Weightman, Joel Hibshman, Tom Shearer, Jeremy Kleinberg, Many Feris at Lutron; Steve Parrott, Christopher Coles, Paul Brit, Dave Beausoleil at Cast Lighting; Ron Naus, Doug Hagen at BK Lighting; Mike Fusco at LED Specialists; James Helms, Kevin Gordon, Pete Woytowitz, Steve Hovelin, Darin Ayres, Dick Hunter, Gregory Hunter at FX Lighting, Robert Moffett at Ecosystems, William Fruscella at Dura-Chem. All these folks and countless others took considerable time over two years to help me understand where we are going with this new technology.
Naomi Miller was in there guiding me again, as she has from the first edition. Others with backgrounds from or still at the LRC helped including Lara (Jacobson) Cordell, Ute Besenecker, and Jean Paul Freyssinier Nova, who met with me every year since 2008 — before I started on the book — to help me prepare.
This effort is always overwhelming and takes years. It consumes my life and erases the concept of free time. As this is happening, it invades my office and those that tried to keep me on solid ground, moving forward can’t be thanked enough. They include Kathleen Hill, Caitlin Toczko, Lisa Case, Julie Decker, Jessica Rauscher, Katie Czub, Peter Fil, Panitkwan (Arex) Soontharuch, Willa Tonne Dames, and Stacey Fallova — who got all the releases prepared, sent out and received back in time to turn in to Wiley for the first time ever — and with less than one months’ notice.
This time the special people behind the scenes, of course include my family, father Dick Lennox, and sister Mary Lennox, but this time it was friends who simply gave me all the patience they could muster and didn’t give up on our friendship — Tom and Vikki Crowell, Mary Kate and Mark McCarty, Barbara Ahern and Conard Holton, and Patti and Tim Slattery.
Beyond the technology change, the other big change in this edition is the chronicling of how landscape lighting has evolved through his camera lens with his incredible vision. George’s photographs of other designers work, like John Pletcher, Tom Williams, all the LLI attendees — a very small cross section of which their designs are included throughout the book — Rick Dekeyser, Gean Tremaine, Brooke Perin, Mary Ann Rivera, Susan Smith, Paul Welty, Ron Carter, Lana Nathe, Joe Patton, John Pletcher, John Kenny, Alison Schieffelin, Ken Simons, Eduardo Tamayo, Rita Widjaja, Curtis Dennison, Karen Duffy, Yvonne English, Emily Gilmore, Paul Gosselin, Emily Gierson, Meagan McGuire, Tom Pena, Rosa Capo-Irizrry, Anna Cheng, Gordon Pevsner, Yale Roncka, Sally Stoik, Jeff Crean, Rick Gottlieb, Anna Lok, Betsy Mitchell, Marilyn Schultz-Goldfine, Joan Roca, Don Bradley, Kathryn Toth, Ariel Heintz, Cory MacCallum, Ken Martin, Jeff Nepple, and his photographs of my clients’ beautiful properties.
