Welcome to BY ART MATTERS, a contemporary art museum that uses daylight as a key feature for providing visual comfort, well-being, and energy savings. Located in Hangzhou, China, this museum is a world-class standard project designed by Arup and lead designers Junko Inomoto, Wenqing Guo, Guillermo Martinez, and Arfon Davies.
Winner in the Cultural Building Lighting Design / Interior Architectural Illumination category at the LIT Lighting Design Awards, BY ART MATTERS’ design showcases an integrated approach to delivering a world-class gallery that provides visitors with a unique and memorable experience.
The ground floor—where the main gallery space is located—features a skylight system that filters daylight through a ‘sail’ shading system on the roof. The sails above the skylights open towards the north, block out direct sunlight during the day and allow diffused daylight to enter the gallery, creating a soft glow on the ceiling scrim while maintaining a view of the sky.
Skylights in central gallery zones that receive little daylight are integrated with LED to supplement ambient lighting, with color temperature fine-tuned to resemble that of the daylight entering the space. In addition, linear lights integrated into the beams above ceiling scrims enhance ambient light and reduce visual differences between real skylights and LED skylights. Track lighting was used throughout the gallery, ensuring flexibility for accentuating art displays.
After dark, ceiling uplights create a warm and welcoming ambiance, with the spill light through the skylight producing a glowing effect on the sails on the roof, creating a striking architectural feature.
By considering both daylight and electric lighting, the design showcases an integrated approach to delivering a world-class gallery that provides visitors with a unique and memorable experience.
The sustainability approach of Arup when designing this project involved considering daylight first. They worked closely with the architect at the early design stages to develop the skylight system, including analyzing local weather conditions and daylight availability, refining the skylight geometry, and selecting the material of the ‘sail’ sun-shading over the skylight.
The daylight and electric lighting system work as a fully integrated lighting system to optimize the lighting ambiance with both daylight and electrical lighting without comprising the lighting requirements in the space. The design team carried out rigorous lighting calculations and mock-up studies to ensure that they achieved the final solution.
A lighting control system was also used to manage energy use. All electric lighting uses LED sources and is dimmable to ensure flexibility for illuminating the art displays as well as for energy saving where possible.
