LEDs are a rapidly increasing part of lighting design. As a method of lighting they have significant benefits; greater energy efficiency, durability and their colour can be tuned extremely precisely during manufacturing. With this rise, vivid, coloured lighting is becoming more and more prevalent. Brightly coloured LEDs are being used as internal lighting; to add character and mood to spaces, and are also being employed to light the facades of buildings in a dizzying array of colours, veritable light shows at almost every corner. Here in Edinburgh we aren’t immune to this fad, the castle is spectacularly lit at night by an LED configuration as well as Jenners, Teviot and the Botanic Gardens. Further afield, in New York. Philips designed a configuration in 2012 to light the Empire State Building, rendering it in different colours to commemorate special occasions such as the classic red, white and blue for the 4th of July. However, despite the welcome injection of colour in to the city scape, these resolutions feel somewhat false, little more than a glitzy face-lift to re-inject some life (see Bilbao). It is easy to see the designs of these lighting treatments are primarily based on form, the harsh uplighting accentuating the details of the art deco building, in a sense, traditional lighting design. The colour appears to be merely an afterthought, something that can be done, and so is. Little attention is paid to the interaction of the lighting colour with the colour of the building itself. With the Empire State Building this makes little difference, the building is a very muted colour and the lighting so bright as to remove all doubts about the effectiveness of the scheme, but on a smaller scale, coloured light can have a much more profound effect on the way that surfaces are perceived. Instead of this sublime scenario, such as in New York, where buildings are projected on to with an undeniable brilliance, where surfaces have a more vivid established colour there can start to be a dialogue between them and the lighting. This dialogue is ignored so far in many of these large scale schemes so I set out to investigate it.

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