Extreme Engineer of the Month

Profile: Mitul Parekh, Illuminating Engineer, Cline Bettridge Bernstein Lighting Design, Inc. (CBBLD)

Education:

• B.Tech in Architectural Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Calicut, India
• M.E. in Architectural Engineering with a specialty in Illuminating Engineering, Penn State

Favorite Classes:

• Daylighting
• Fixture Design

Best Skills: Analytical thinking—coming up with options then determining what works best

Hobbies: Independent music and movies

Role Model: No particular role models, but have always admired my parents for being very supportive of education.

Advice: Study hard. There's no easy way around it. Competition today is global. You have to prepare yourself to the fullest.

Art and Science—Bringing Things to Light

Growing up in India, Mitul was always interested in architecture, but he was also good in science and math.  Based on the reputation of schools, he enrolled in the National Institute of Technology in Calicut, which offered architectural engineering. He was drawn to the program as an interesting mix of architecture and engineering but wasn’t certain if it was the right fit. It’s hard at that age to know what the right pick is. “Sometimes you just have to follow your gut,” he says.

He liked all the architectural aspects of the program, yet recognized that the structural engineering component wasn’t for him.  He starting reading about the specialties within the field, and by his senior year knew he was drawn to the lighting aspect. Daylighting was particularly interesting to Mitul. It intrigued him that you could design a building to bring more daylight into the space and enhance energy efficiency.

After deciding to study lighting, he found there were no programs for that specialty in India. In fact, there are just a few schools in the world that focus on lighting. Prominent in the United States are Penn State, Colorado State, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), and Parsons, which is more design oriented than engineering. Mitul selected Penn State and immediately loved the program because lighting has both the aesthetic/design side as well as technical aspects.

“You need to quantify how much light you need in a space, which involves physics and mathematics,” Mitul says. “It’s the perfect balance for anyone who has aptitudes in design and is interested in the physics of it.”  In addition, he notes that there is a psychological aspect, which made it all the more interesting for him. “Lighting affects your mood, so you can create a mood with light. You can change the mood in any space by changing the lighting,” he added. The program was more technical with less emphasis on design, but he says it was a really enjoyable two years.

Among the courses Mitul liked best was fundamentals of lighting. “It’s very important to understand the fundamentals and to have them firmly rooted,” he says. Two of his other favorite classes were daylighting, which he says was exceptional, and a class on fixture optics design.  Mitul explained that fixtures have a light source/bulb and housing, which controls the throw or distribution of the light. “It’s purely physics,” he says. “Most fixtures have a reflector or lens, which reflects light or refracts light and achieves the right control and distribution of that light source.”

The daylighting class covered how different sky conditions (sunny, cloudy, overcast), longitude and latitude (the angle of the sun’s rays coming in the windows), and time of day all affect the amount of light coming in a window at any give time. The course teaches you to quantify available light based on all these factors.  Today software programs help you do this. You build a 3D model of the space in software and designate sky conditions, geographic location, and time of day. The program then calculates the amount of available day light. Another way to do it is to build a model of the building. For one of his classes, Mitul built a model of a building on campus and compared the actual readings from the model to those generated by a computer program.

Most of the projects Mitul works on are based on artificial light, but for projects that have atriums with large glass exposure, he calculates the amount of daylight to know how much supplemental artificial light is needed.  Some projects, he noted, have hardly any daylight coming in at all.

After graduation Mitul applied to several lighting design firms and received multiple job offers. He selected Cline Bettridge Bernstein Lighting Design, Inc. (CBBLD) because of “the amazing work they’ve done” and because of their philosophy to integrate light into architecture rather than doing light as a separate element. “Light shows architecture,” he says. “It doesn’t show itself.”

7 World Trade Center

One of Mitul’s favorite projects is  the new 7 Word Trade Center building, the first building to rise out of the ashes of the 9/11 attacks. His firm worked on the lighting for the base building—the building’s lobby, the exterior base, the plaza and the tower top of the building. He was the associate on his firm’s project team, which included principal designer Francesca Bettridge and senior associate Michael Hennes. The building was designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM).

The building’s architecture and lighting scheme had several significant challenges to overcome.  A smaller than usual building footprint was a tradeoff to providing 115-feet of setback from the street for security reasons. This meant that the first four floors—or 80 vertical feet—could not have windows because all of that space was required for the building’s electrical transformers. To compensate and create a blended look between the concrete wall of the base and the windows of the tower above, the building was clad with stainless steel panels embedded with screens of LED lights. During the day, the panels reflect sunlight in much the same way as low-E window glass. At night the screen layer comes alive and illuminates the building base with a peaceful blue glow.  In a significant engineering feat, small blue and white LED lights were integrated into the screen in a pattern that diffuses light evenly across the surface avoiding hot spots. Quick connects at the panel seams provide for maintenance access.

© Photo by David Sundbery of Esto Photographics

“The project was quite challenging,” says Mitul. Incorporating lighting in the stainless steel screen wall was quite an engineering feat. While LEDs themselves are not new, the use of LEDs in architectural lighting is. “To integrate LEDs into the screen wall was a major challenge. To integrate the light fixtures within the screen walls and to preinstall them at the fabricator and detail it in a way that the wiring connection is made on site required tremendous coordination between various consultants and detailing.”

© Photo by David Sundbery of Esto Photographics

The building’s lobby has an L-shaped translucent glass ceiling that goes up, wraps around, and creates and artificial glowing skylight.  It’s backlit with fluorescent lighting.  In addition to the white light, the CBBLD team added colored light—blue and red fluorescents. The lights are connected to a control system so they can be programmed to change color through the day.  During daytime, only white fluorescent lamps are turn on. At dusk, the red and the blue lamps turn on and are all dimmed appropriately to provide a blue-white color with a red tinge suggesting the sunset hue.  Then, as it gets dark outside, the red lamps turn off and the intensity of blue increases and the lobby glows with a nice blue-white color creating the feeling of moonlight. 

The top of the building was lit to provide a signature iconic look.  A back louvered wall conceals the mechanical equipment and cooling tower located there. Light fixtures on the structure that supports the outer curtain wall shine light on to the back wall, creating a softly glowing tower top and a new addition to the NYC night skyline.

© Photo by David Sundbery of Esto Photographics

The project has been written up in a number of magazines, including a four-page, full-color spread in the September-October 2006 issue of Architectural Lighting magazine. Click here for a link to the magazine. The website currently features the July-August issue of the magazine, but it should be changing to feature the September-October issue soon.