Lighting for Museums
and Art Galleries

Generally, the lighting for museums and art galleries should emphasise the colours, texture and form of the art exhibits, whilst observing any conservation issues.

The National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi is a European funded cultural art centre project.

Triad Architects were awarded this important national museum project as their architectural practice is one of the largest in East Africa.

Triad's principle architect wanted to appoint a specialist with an excellent reputation in providing lighting for museums and art galleries. He understood the importance of high quality lighting for the museum interiors and object displays.

So with this in mind, it was decided that SMA lighting designers would be the best choice, providing expertise to the architectural team and museums staff.

The existing museum and art galleries are world famous for its Leakey collection of human skulls. These are the oldest dated skulls ever found. The project included renovating the 1930’s colonial building and art galleries, plus the building of exciting new visitors centre.

It was decided that specialist consultation should start immediately. Work commenced with meetings including all interest parties to understanding their goals and aspirations. This was followed by a site visit to better appreciate the architecture and other items that would affect the building and display lighting designs.
For example; suns positioning to site, levels of natural light into each gallery, was daylighting required and a better comprehension of what each gallery would have on display.

Obviously it was paramount for us to understand what delicate photo sensitive items existed within their collection and adjust the lighting design to accommodate. Our lighting designers are able to impart vital information regarding conservation lighting for museums and art galleries. This includes light levels, infrared radiation and how to treat individual galleries and public spaces.

It is important to realise that the use of any specialist for lighting museums and art galleries is unheard of in Kenya. These specialist design tasks would normally be undertaken by the architect and electrical engineers.  

It is always paramount that lighting for museums and art galleries are flexible, energy efficient and affordable. Therefore we proposed that galleries utilise 3 circuit track mounted in a modular grid format. This wall accurately positioned so that both 2D and 3D objects could be illuminated with high quality lighting.

This design approach is the most flexible and achieves the highest quality of lighting. It would also allow galleries to change the nature of their displays, whilst allowing the lighting to accommodate.

For these reasons and many others it became clear to all parties that our expertise could help them enormously with the actual gallery design layouts and visitor flows.

One of our suggestions to the museum design was to change the entrance and exit strategy. Our innovative design would keep these two areas separated and make visitors exit by passing the shop. The advantage of this being it would reduce the bottle neck of visitors and increased sales within the museum shop.

Other museum design suggestions were also adopted before we returned to the UK, where we continued to assist Triad with our lighting and museum consultancy.

The National Museum of Kenya opened its doors to great acclaim; with the exciting architecture of the new visitor centre building providing the focal point to the new arts complex.