Happenstance Collaboration in Lighting Design

Last week we published a feature on Ketra, a lighting tech company that designs all the components for each of its bulbs in-house, quite like how Apple makes its products.

This week, we bring your attention to another lighting story, but one from a different perspective.

Any number of beginning points can happen when a new product is conceived. The most basic of those is when a company provides a design team with a specific design brief, often backed by market research and trend reflection, sometimes accompanied by a sensible attempt to fill a gap in its product portfolio.

But, as many in the industry know from experience, some of the best products come from happenstance: coincidental collaborations between the right people that somehow seem to fall into place at the right moment. These are often the most rewarding types of collaborations; experiences that you remember as markers throughout your career.

Huntsman Architectural Group began an initial collaboration with Brooklyn-based Juniper Lighting to provide desk lighting for Huntsman’s client Argonaut, an up-and-coming ad agency in San Francisco.

David Meckley, Huntsman Architectural Group’s design director, then came to Juniper with a need for a large scale custom lighting design for a conference room space at Argonaut.

A custom LED lighting fixture, designed and produced for a San Fran ad agency’s boardroom by Juniper Lighting and David Meckley, of Huntsman Architectural Group. Photography: courtesy of Juniper & Huntsman Architectural Group

“They had a beautiful boardroom, and wanted something that really canvased the entire room, something that flooded it with lots of light,” said Shant Madjarian, founder of Juniper Lighting. “They also needed to design something that would avoid certain areas of the ceiling in order to be able to easily reach the HVAC system.

“David drove the design, and it was very clear from the beginning that he had a vision. And it was our job to make it work – to provide the design engineering, propose the solutions, build the parts and make it a reality.”

Mr. Meckley’s design concept centered around three pieces of inspiration:

>A nautical theme that taps into Argonaut’s San Francisco home.

>Rock music, and more specifically the lighting in staged rock shows. This one may seem out of left field, but Argonaut’s new office building was once the historic Avalon Ballroom venue where “summer of love” musicians like Janis Joplin and Jimmy Hendrix first began their careers.

>A piping aesthetic calling to mind the Bauhaus movement.

And, as the A&D community knows, the design process can flow smoothly or…not. Luckily, the former was the case for Mr. Meckley.

First floor desks with Juniper Lighting at Argonaut. Interior design by Huntsman Architectural Group. Photography: David Wakely

“A majority of the design happened in one day. I was at NeoCon when we received the approval to be able to move forward with the project, and by that time, we were behind in the design for Argonaut. So I went back to my hotel during the show, and sketched it out on a piece of paper in a few hours.”

After the initial design phase, Juniper followed with an engineering element, which involved rendering and development. Then, Juniper turned its attention to the nuts and bolts of physically creating the pieces. Altogether the machining and anodizing of all the parts took six weeks. To finish, the team conducted sampling, then finished with wiring and voltage.

The final collaborative effort is a wall-to-wall network of 20 precision-machined LED module lighting fixtures, delivering 80,000 dimmable lumens and linked together by a series of connecters. The design is heavy in hand-finished brass fittings and hardware, but also aluminum; due to the high heat of the LEDs in the fixtures, aluminum was used to be able to anodize the parts.

“Since Argonaut was going into an older historic ballroom space, we were also concerned that the ceiling had asbestos in it, and so we didn’t want to touch it,” noted Mr. Madjarian.

For that reason, among the obvious aesthetic reasons, the solution leaves much of the ceiling undisturbed with the network of flexible components nesting below.

Mr. Madjarian found the finished design so handsome and agile that he decided to see if Mr. Meckley was interested in bringing the collaboration full circle into a collection of lighting designs for Juniper built around the Argonaut solution.

“It turned out to be an absolutely gorgeous feature,” said Mr. Madjarian. “Once I saw the product come to life, I knew it was something we wanted to pursue more.”

What emerged is Metropolis, a full system of LED lighting products based upon the Argonaut solution, a designer erector set with a group of connectors and a group of struts, to be introduced to customers in three phases.

“The first phase, which will launch at ICFF 2017, will consist of the Metropolis Wall-to-Wall (WTW) system and individual Metropolis Suspension units,” says Mr. Madjarian. “The WTW can be configured to fit any room size, and despite its very custom appearance, designers and architects can specify the entire fixture by simply providing room length and desired drop. The individual Suspension fixtures will come in 2′, 3′ and 4′ length in two standard finishes, brass/black and polished aluminum/black.”

Phase two, to launch late 2017, will see the introduction of the wall sconce version and the Metropolis Perpetual Suspension System. The latter will comprise a system of linear and angular connectors used to create continuous runs of the suspension fixture intended for office environments and public spaces.

“Designers will be able to create all kinds of things with it,” said Mr. Meckley. “Juniper is special for how much time they spend perfecting the details. Everything will be very easy to specify and will fit together perfectly.”

Juniper desk lighting at Argonaut. Interior design by Huntsman Architectural Group.

Flexibility and scalability will also be an advantage to designers using the products. The collection includes small sconces, but can flow easily into larger office spaces using the series connectors and struts. And the LEDs will feature an up/down component enabling users to adjust the light level. The collection will be available in a couple finish options, including brass and polished aluminum.

The design project fell victim to a funny but common thing that happens while developing a new product; throughout the life of the project, the collaborators naturally referred to it as the “Argonaut” lighting, and it stuck. But, Juniper eventually landed on the name Metropolis for the collection’s official name.

“When arranged, it has a very deco feel to it, obviously an updated version of that. But it also has a very urban, very architectural feel that we wanted to reflect in the name.”

Whatever it’s called, we like it. The project draws attention to all the unique paths any new idea can take to come to fruition. And it highlights the way projects can build and snowball together to create unexpected partnerships and alliances.