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PROJECT / SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND
Photographs: Andrew Lee
The LED lighting blends seemlessly with the daylighting giving animation to the artworks, something that director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, James Holloway, was keen to achieve after experiencing the Dutch Masters in daylight at the National Gallery in London when he was a student.
and Antiquities on the other. Latterly the Antiquities side was essentially used for warehousing so there were just fluorescent bulkhead battens throughout. There was no delicacy! Yet the Portrait side was one of Jonathan Speirs’ first projects with LDP so it was very elegant but obviously outdated. The lighting needed to have a completely fresh perspective and the brief was all about opening up the space to light.” The renovation, which took place over two years when the gallery was shut to the public, has completely opened up the build- ing allowing uninterupted views through the building and giving access to the public to all three floors for the first time. According to Holloway, daylighting was an important aspect of the renovation: “The brief was also about using as much daylight as possible taking into account the delicacy
of the artworks. What we wanted to do was to give the feeling of light changing so the pictures have a kind of dynamism that you lose so often in a modern gallery. The lighting also had to be sympathetic to the space. As part of the process we looked at different types of LED lighting and I thought it looked absolutely fantastic. I am thrilled with the result because you get the colours standing out and it is very economical. The combination of daylight and artificial light works extremely well and it’s very control- lable too.” This is particularly noticable in the Ram- say Room, the centrepiece of the gallery, where a huge skylight, previously hidden from view, allows daylight to gush in to the centre of the space whilst frosting on the edge of the skylight diffuses light where the paintings hang.
At the other end of the scale the Pho- tography Room operates at the normally prohibitive 35 lux level, way under the 50 lux recommended, which is possible due the uniformity and excellent CRI of the LED system “The curator has asked me on numerous occasions if it really is 35 lux! Everyone is conditioned by what they have experienced over a long period of time and you expect, in exhibitions like this, to have to go really close to the photograph to see the detail,” comments Fraser. The building now gives people different ex- periences depending on which gallery they walk through - eg, the library is very Victo- rian, the Photography Room is very modern - and throughout the lighting is carefully and deliberately layered depending on the artworks that are illuminated.
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