Canada Line lighting design wins international award

The lighting system design for Vancouver’s rapid transit Canada Line which opened last year has won a top international award.

At the 2010 Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) Awards, Total Lighting Solutions of Vancouver (Galina Zbrizher) won the 2010 Energy and Environmental Design Award. The award is sponsored by Osram Sylvania.

This is the second international award that the Canada Line lighting design has won. In May, it won an award of merit from the International Association of Lighting Designers (IALD), held in Las Vegas.

SNC-Lavalin commissioned Total Lighting Solutions to develop a distinctive lighting design that would apply across the entire 19-kilometre system and yet be developed at the detail level to highlight the individual architecture of each of the 16 stations.

The design achieved energy savings by means such as avoiding over-lighting, integrating daylight sensors, and scheduling the lights to turn off during unoccupied periods.

In the concourses, continuous lines of linear fluorescent lamps (mostly T8, T5 or T5HO) were used to orient the travellers and miminize shadows, while custom designed downlights mark the paying zones and circulation spaces.

For the platform edges, Total Lighting Solutions developed a special light with manufacturer Peerless Lighting. It is a single electronic-ballasted high performance T8 lamp that gives 23% direct light to the paving edge and 77% indirect light to illuminate the platform area.