January 4, 2018
About:
As a warm up to the award season, please join us for a panel discussion with last year’s award recipients. It will be an informative and inspiring discussion with the project designers. Hear from the designer’s in their own words how the project came to be. And get the inside view as to why these projects were selected by the judges.”
December 7, 2017
Every year Interior Design Magazine names the best of interior design in over 113 categories. This year, we are honored to have several of our lighting projects named as Honorees! View all of the winning projects here!
RDC-S111 Urban Office
Category: Firm’s Own Office
Architect: Retail Design Collaborative / Studio One Eleven
November 20, 2017
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) recently announced the winners of its prestigious 2017 Design Awards for Los Angeles and Long Beach/South Bay. The projects listed below incorporated Oculus’ lighting design and how lucky are we to have been able to collaborate on such a fantastic range of community enhancing spaces! Check out the photos to get a glimpse of each along with a few of the jurors’ comments!
October 18, 2017
Meet Riley Rose! This new candy-colored beauty store concept offers up everything from skin care to makeup to home decor. The new store brand comes from daughters of the Forever 21 founders, well known for selling the latest fashion trends and Riley Rose is no exception. Not to mention, most of their beauty products come from cruelty-free beauty brands!
The store caters to younger generations using ‘millennial’ pink in its palette and creating store installations that are ‘Instagrammable’. According to a recent Bustle article, “That’s how Riley Rose plans to set themselves apart from the Sephoras and the Ultas. It’s more than just beauty shop — they see themselves as a “lifestyle store.”
September 20, 2017
Congratulations to Studio One Eleven and RDCollaborative for recently receiving a Platinum LEED Certification by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). Oculus Light Studio was happy to contribute by designing the offices’ sustainable and energy-efficient lighting. This is certainly a difficult feat to receive the highest of certification ratings as only 6% of LEED projects actually achieve Platinum certification!
July 11, 2017
It was a fun and exciting night at the annual Lumen West Awards and Dinner, put on by the Los Angeles and Orange County Sections of the Illuminated Engineering Society. This year’s event took place at the historic Biltmore Hotel and it created the perfect atmosphere for all the festivities of the night which included a cocktail hour, the award’s dinner and an after-party with a live band. The Oculus team enjoyed cheering on and socializing with our colleagues and friends throughout the event!
Oculus was one of the big winners of the night, taking home an Award of Excellence for Boston Consulting Group and three Lumen West Awards of Merit for interior lighting design for The Bloc, Officine Brera, and Creative Tech Hub Backlot.
June 30, 2017
We’re happy and honored to announce that Oculus Light Studio has won three awards at the 2017 IES Illumination Awards:
Award of Merit for Creative Tech Hub
Award of Merit for Officine Brera
Award of Merit for Boston Consulting Group
March 13, 2017
Last week I attended the IALD Enlighten Asia Tokyo + Lighting Fair 2017 combination event in Japan, and it served as a great reminder that we have an ever-growing toolbox of lighting products, manufacturing and construction techniques… but it left me with a few questions to ponder: What is it about the human experience that we want to capture or relate to in our designs? Lighting can be so abstract yet visceral at the same time; how do we as Lighting Designers use it to shape the environment and connect with the users within?
A few of the Enlighten seminars provided some insight—Mark Major (Speirs + Major) presented the first hour called “The Qualities of Night (or why we need darkness as well as light)”, and he referenced Junichiro Tanizaki’s essays “In Praise of Shadows”, which celebrate intentional darkness for its ability to grant us mental “quietness” and by contrast allow us to be more aware of and appreciate illumination. In application, this means designing with darkness as much as we are designing with light (especially in exterior landscaped areas) so that we can create a distinct nighttime character as opposed to just replicating or extending the daytime experience.
December 12, 2016
Zumtobel released a case study on our Legendary Entertainment project located in Burbank, CA. Designed by Felderman Keatinge and Associates the offices are for the well-known entertainment giant, and as such had to be creative, modern, reflective of the brand, and environmentally conscious. Oculus was able to utilized some of Zumtobel’s products on the project, with visual and concealed lighting elements.
Zumtobel were helpful through the entire process, by helping not only in the specification of the custom finished Ondaria pendant and surface mounted luminaires but also by assisting the project team answer the City Inspector’s questions by providing on-site visits in conjunction with the local representative, LightBuildDesign.
We look forward to working with the project team again!
Read the full case study on Zumtobel’s website.
July 19, 2016
Oculus designers Chao-Wei Su and Spurthy Yogananda have both been selected as Emerging Lighting Designers and awarded scholarships to attend the IALD Enlighten Americas Conference in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. IALD describes the conference as “Offering a global perspective to educational sessions, the conference program will offer 21 inspirational and informational sessions in three concurrent tracks, featuring 35 confirmed architectural lighting design experts from nine countries”.
These are the third and fourth scholarships won by Oculus designers in the past few years, the first having gone to Jane You in 2014 and the second to Sarah Wang in 2015. Congratulations to Chao-Wei and Spurthy, and thank you to all of the sponsors for the opportunity for young designers to continue to grow and learn within the industry!
July 15, 2016
We’re happy and honored to announce that after winning three awards at IES Illumination National Level:
Award of Merit for Blue Ribbon Sushi Bar & Grill
Award of Merit for CIM Group
Award of Merit for Google Orange County Energy and Environmental Design
Award of Merit for Google Orange County
Award of Merit for Murad
April 29, 2016
This week was a busy one with multiple site and aiming visits, but the team was still able to take the opportunity to drive down to Lightfair International 2016 in San Diego, California for a walk around the convention center floor to view all of the latest and greatest luminaires available from most of the major lighting manufacturers in the industry. But Lightfair isn’t just a large showroom, it is also a place where lighting industry professionals can learn, network, attend panels to inspire new ideas, and even interact with students who are just breaking into the industry. We had the opportunity to attend the 2016 IALD Awards Dinner at the San Diego Air and Space Museum in Balboa Park. The Awards Ceremony recognizes lighting design from all over the world and is one of the most prestigious lighting design awards, so we were very fortunate to be hosted by Wattstopper, Cooledge, Edison Price, Eaton, and Wiedenbach Brown Lighting. We won an IALD award a couple of years back, and we hope for a repeat performance soon!
April 1, 2016
Oculus Principal Archit Jain was invited to speak on the Illuminating Engineering Society of Los Angeles Panel “Collaborating with Lighting Designers-a Panel Discussion About Bridging the Gap between Artistic and Technical”. About a hundred people showed up and it was an evening dedicated to the idea that while lighting seems intangible during the the design process, it has a profound effect on the final outcome of a space. Ultimately they discussed how they work, and how they prefer to best work together to create beautiful and memorable spaces.
March 21, 2016
Oculus Principals Archit and Scott are back from their trip to Frankfurt, Germany for the 2016 Light + Building Exhibition. The show is one of the largest on the planet, encompassing almost 6 million SF of floor space to show the latest and greatest in lighting technology from over 2,500 vendors from all over the world. Of particular note were the many advances in smart technology dedicated to improving the way that humans interact with light in their everyday lives; a concept perhaps best demonstrated by the CoeLux Skylight that “reproduces the physical effects and optical phenomena of natural light in indoor architecture”.
February 10, 2016
Take at look at our most recent nod in Architect Magazine’s January 2016 edition, this time for a truly unique residential project that we had the opportunity to work on with Koning Eizenburg. Located in Santa Monica, the “See-Through House” is a modern take on a barn that still maintains the warmth and welcome of a family home. It is a design that takes full advantage of sprawling windows to capture the California sunshine, so as lighting designers our task was to provide the required illumination without disrupting the architectural planes. Few recessed luminaires were utilized, with most integrated carefully within architectural elements.
Check out more photos of the finished project below, or click HERE to view the article in it’s entirety.
September 21, 2015
LEDs bring several possibilities. At the same time there are pitfalls. What are the biggest issues with LED lighting that we have encountered in the last many years? How does that effect the decisions of how LED lighting is used within our projects?
Join an IIDA panel discussion with Oculus principal Archit Jain, along with Scott Johnson (Principal – Brilliant Lighting Studio, moderator), Moritz Hammer (Senior Associate – KGM Lighting), Heather Libonati (Principal – Luminesce Design) and Sean McMurray (President – ALVA) to review how lighting has changed in the last few years, and what are some pressing concerns that still need to be addressed.
LightShow West, Wednesday October 21, 4:00 to 5:00 PM.
Los Angeles Convention Center
November 20, 2014
Special thanks and congratulations to our architect friends at Shubin + Donaldson for all of our great work on Murad’s first flagship store, recognized as one of “The Most Beautiful New Stores in L.A.”
A combination of recessed linear fluorescent downlights, recessed adjustable accents, and tracklights provide a bright and clean clinical feel without the cold institutional look and with all the warmth of a lifestyle retail store.
October 1, 2014
Our design for AKA Beverly Hill has been featured in the Lighting Today’s July-September issue. Lighting Today is an architectural lighting magazine based in Singapore, and our project appears on page 77 . Click here to read more about the boutique hotel and get a behind-the-scenes look!
September 4, 2014
We’re excited that Philips is extending the Hue line beyond lamps and strips to 3d printed luminaires. And in the process also educating the general public on what a luminaire is. Engadget published an article on the topic. We’ve had fun playing with the Hue line, and recently used some in our Conill project where it becomes a low cost, interactive way to bring dynamic color to an office space.
So do remember that a lamp (aka a light bulb), fixture housing, and diffusing medium together make a “luminaire”. Or in Engadget’s words, “…an enclosed light fitting, like a table lamp or a pendant light is technically called a luminaire.” Here’s to the next lighting fixture luminaire schedule.
August 23, 2014
The second Pirch store designed by Oculus opened in Dallas this week and was covered in the Dallas News. Good aiming at the end of the project is critical, and like the last time, Scott and David spent a total of 24 hours climbing up and down ladders to aim the approximately 1000 adjustable lights in the store (that’s about 500 times each, if you do the math).
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