Arup is a leading lighting design and advisory practice, and the creative team behind the illumination of many of the world’s most beautiful and beloved buildings. We are artists and designers, engineers and consultants, your creative partners on projects of every kind and scale.

We take a 24-hour approach to designing with light, producing beautiful and sustainable designs at any scale or in any context. How we experience and interact with light is central to our creative process. Whether it working on an interior space or exterior, our lighting designers and advisors integrate both daylight and architectural lighting in harmony.   

Energy efficiency and sustainability

Lighting is a major factor in operational energy use and we are driving down energy use through highly sustainable lighting design and lead the way on circular processes. We’re also pioneering new approaches like circular design principles, to increase the design-for-reuse and recycling in large scale lighting projects. And we’re assisting our clients in adopting circular design, providing flexible specifications that let them source the lowest energy, most recyclable solutions across a building or asset’s entire lifecycle.  

Lighting and wellbeing

Today, we recognise that light has a significant impact on human wellbeing. Our own circadian lighting recommendations are based on internal research as well external guides like the WELL Building Standard. Together these enable us to design lighting systems that are both beautiful and healthy, setting realistic expectations while complying with stringent energy codes.

How we can help you:

Daylighting

Given its importance to all our lives and wellbeing, ensuring our homes and places of work have access to adequate daylight is vital.

Daylighting

Daylight is vital to our health and well-being and is the only truly sustainable light source.

Example of daylight flooding an exhibition space

Making more use of daylight in place of electric lighting can help reduce energy consumption. These are just two reasons why prioritising daylighting in cities is important for developers, architects, politicians and society as a whole.

Given its importance to all our lives and wellbeing, ensuring our homes and places of work have access to adequate daylight is a mainstream issue. Daylight must be enshrined in the regulations that shape our cities and considered in the earliest design phases of any building development. It is crucial to embrace daylighting design at the beginning of a holistic, 24 hour lighting design process, where buildings are designed for daylight first and supplemented with electric lighting later. This approach can increase in the quality of interior spaces and achieve significant reductions in energy consumption from lighting.

Daylight is variable by day, by season and by location, driven by the movement and position of our planet around the sun. Understanding this relationship allows us to create design solutions specific to the project context and climate, generating geometrical forms that are informed by the movement of the sun. This allows architecture and the built environment to be informed and shaped by daylight.

Discover our work in daylighting

Architectural lighting

Our approach starts from a human-centric perspective combined with strong conceptual thinking, leading to lighting design that supports wellbeing across a range of structures.

Architectural lighting

Within architecture, lighting directs, sculpts, enriches, and provides people with a comfortable, safe and inspiring environment.

The spire of 101 Collins Street has been a Melbourne city landmark since 1991

The spire of 101 Collins Street has been a Melbourne city landmark since 1991. Arup were tasked with designing and creating architectural lighting to illuminate the night sky with a choreographed display made from 700m of linear LEDs moving in a sequence of rich hues and intensities.

Our approach starts from a deeply human-centric perspective combined with strong conceptual thinking, leading to lighting design that supports wellbeing in healthcare environments, sophisticated and inspiring spaces for hospitality and retail, or sustainable and nurturing experiences for workplaces and education clients. 

 

On corporate and mixed-use schemes, lighting often has to perform many roles, working in effective combinations. We are often commissioned to develop a signature visual of the lighting experience, or finding ways to push down energy requirements and increase the lighting’s long-term sustainability.

In the arts and cultural context, light functions as an artistic component, producing a desired feeling, mood and experience within the architectural identity of the structure. Lighting is an art, and in different ways our designers are all sculptors, painters, engineers and authors too. This fusion of skill and approach is how we produce incredible lighting experiences for the art-going public, whether it’s the world’s best loved museums, galleries or theatres.

Travel hubs are some of the most demanding and busy environments, in which lighting plays a central role in how easy and enjoyable they are to navigate and use. They’re often a signature introduction to a country or city. We are experts in developing lighting schemes that harmonise with the architectural design, local lighting conditions, and human factors at play in transport settings.

Find out more about our work on 101 Collins Street

Night-time lighting

As consultants and designers, we take a considered and balanced approach to the city or rural landscape at night.

Night-time lighting

How do you light life after dark? Urban light reflects on a location’s identity – and somehow it needs to feel safe for older people yet alive to the young. 

Dongdaemun World Design Park Plaza, Seoul © Grace Wong

Too often the need to provide illumination inside and outside a building leads to brash, over-lit, designs that take little account of their setting. As consultants and designers, we take a considered and balanced approach to the city or rural landscape at night. We believe in engaging with the community and its needs before designing a truly effective and sustainable solution.  

Learn more about our night time design services

Lighting advisory services

Our lighting consultants work in partnership with clients, in recognition of the fact that lighting outcomes must be factored into project designs from the earliest stages.

Lighting advisory services

Lighting’s role in the urban environment must be carefully managed, from city scale planning for daylight as well as night time lighting, always retaining a human-centred perspective.

At the policy level, lighting needs to reflect the way the whole community navigates the city.

We advise clients with global strategy, design and technical matters, as well as planning, expert witness and legal matters. 

Lighting will always shape the visitor, user, consumer or employee experience in ways that determine a building or environment’s ultimate ‘performance’. Our lighting consultants work in partnership with clients, in recognition of the fact that lighting outcomes must be factored into project designs from the earliest stages. 

For this reason we are guided by a 24-hour approach. During the daytime, our teams will undertake daylight planning and massing impact guidance and analysis. These can help to provide answers about the right scale and the densification, as well as establishing important metrics like residents’ right-to-light.  

How can lighting make our cities more inclusive?