Candela Lighting Design

Practice

Architectural lighting design for buildings that have to be seen after dark

Position

Candela is an independent lighting design practice working on cathedrals, bridges, museums, concert halls and civic space. We are not a manufacturer and we sell nothing: we specify, model, mock up and commission light on behalf of the people who commission the building.

Light is a material with a cost. Every lumen we specify is energy burned and sky glow added, so the first question on any site is what can stay dark. We design in section before plan, we test at full scale on the real surface before we commit a single fitting, and we come back after handover to re-aim what has moved. We do not decorate buildings with light. We describe them.

Founded 2004 Copenhagen Montreal

People

Who will be on your project.

Nineteen designers and engineers across two studios. The four below lead the work, and at least one of them attends every focus session the practice runs.

Founding Partner

Marit Halvorsen

Marit founded the practice in Copenhagen in 2004 after eleven years lighting museums and cathedrals across northern Europe. She still runs the focus sessions on every sacred and heritage project the studio takes on.

Heritage fabric, sacred space, exterior composition
Partner, Montreal Studio

Camille Tremblay

Camille opened the Montreal studio in 2012 and leads the practice on performance and civic work across the Americas. She sits on the technical committee that reviews obtrusive light guidance for cold-climate cities.

Performance venues, civic and public realm, cold-climate exteriors
Associate Director, Controls and Commissioning

Rohan Desai

Rohan came to lighting from broadcast engineering and rebuilt the way the practice writes control specifications. He has commissioned more than seventy DALI and DMX installations and has strong opinions about fade times.

Control architecture, dimming performance, flicker and broadcast
Senior Lighting Designer and Research Lead

Nadia Okonkwo

Nadia leads the internal research programme, including the ongoing comparison of modelled and measured glare on completed sites. She teaches the annual studio unit on ecological impact and dark corridors.

Glare research, ecology and dark-sky policy, museum conservation

On record

0+ Schemes delivered since 2004
0 Countries worked in across five continents
0 Designers and engineers Copenhagen and Montreal
0% Average load reduction measured on relighting work
Studios
Lygtestraede 6, 2. sal, 1207 Copenhagen K, Denmark
5410 Rue de la Verriere, Suite 300, Montreal QC H2T 1S1, Canada

Next

Bring us in early.

The cheapest lighting decisions are the ones made while the drawings are still soft. Tell us what you are building.

Start a project