Overview
An interior renovation of a heritage site in DTLA – formerly known as One Bunker Hill, home to the Southern California Edison Company. Post renovation and rebranding, this fourteen-story, steel-framed, 1931 iconic build was to return to its classically inspired Art Deco design under its new name, The CalEdison Building.
The Remastering of a DTLA Landmark
The now CalEdison Building stands triumphantly on the corner of 5th Street and Grand Avenue in DTLA’s Financial District. The new owners wanted to remaster this historic building, which involved the removal of structural alternations – interior and exterior – made in the 1980s so to restore its fantastic, original architectural design features. Furthermore, the renovations were to include thoughtful repositioning of the interior for creative office use.
The challenge for the designers was to retain and underscore the building’s history and architectural integrity, but to update, adapt, repurpose the environment for present-day office needs.
Careful, Coordinated Lighting Design
This modern though classically inspired renovation project – helmed by LA-based architectural and interior design firm Omgivning – concentrated on ambitious efforts to repurpose and relight the space. The primary focus of the lighting scheme was to institute an efficient, state of the art system that is vivid yet subtle enough not to dominate the overall architecture and sophisticated Art-Deco features.
To realize this, leaders of revitalization, Omgivning, integrated BL Flexform D2 in 3000K into their lighting design package. Specified not only for its high density light output, all variations of the BL Flexform Series inherently adjust to a broad dimming range via 0-10V control – all the while maintaining a consistent spectrum of finely tuned colour and high CRI.
Installed linearly across the traditional and creatively flavored lobby and corridors, the BL Flexform D2 crafted a warm, luxurious ambience giving the cubic Art-Deco patterns along the lobby ceilings, coves and walls with the depth needed for such intricate, architectural elements.
In order to give the restrooms a sort of opposing, modernist feel, the BL Flexform D3 in 4000K was installed to incorporate a sleek, contemporary lighting design. Integrated into lean, tall, extruded mirrors, the BL Flexform D3 emanates a backlight creating not only a beautifully lit wall feature, but generates enough lumens for the functional lighting that is required in this kind of public space.
In both areas, BL Fixform CH2212 extrusions were used for mounting in order to keep precise uniformity of the lighting design, while providing an adequate heat-sink in order to keep the lighting cool to maximize the lifespan of the LEDs.
Modernity Captures Tradition
The end result retains the CalEdison Building’s natural, classicist elegance and character, while stealthily integrating state of the art, fully custom, decorative lighting systems. The BL Flexform Series allowed the designers to adequately capture the traditional character of the interior scheme, and doing so with the low-impact, highly sustainable lighting system dedicated to precise CCT and CRI, dimming control, and efficacy that was required.
