LED Lighting Retrofits in Churches Across the World
A number of sacred and historic sites across the world, such as the 17th Century Church of Porza, Durham Cathedral in England, and even the Vatican in St Peter’s Square have recently benefited from the application of glare-reducing LED Rope Lights and recessed LED Strip Lights in order to benefit their worshippers and visitors, as well as generate interest in the sites by giving them a fresh take and a fresh perspective, without altering any of the existing architecture.
LED Lighting has always had a rather undeserved reputation for being stark, bright, and absolutely impossible to configure – impossible to “get right” as it were. There’s nasty rumours which circulate around LED Lighting, as well as quite a lot of incorrect assumption – the most prevalent (and the most incorrect) of all being that there’s only one form of LED Lighting – an ultra bright shade of almost UV light.
This (incorrect) assumption about LED Lighting comes from the last 1980s and early 1990s, when LED Lighting was first introduced as a much cheaper way to light the environment. Led Lighting back then of course had its limitations, and “all or nothing” with regard to the volume of lighting was the chief one. Simply put, while the technology for LED Lighting was there, it was still in its infancy, and not quite ready to be released to the public and industry just yet. If anything, the early stumbles of LED Lighting created a rather snooty approach to the lighting in its entirety, and halogen lighting and CFL companies took advantage of this in order to keep selling their products even though by all accounts, traditional lighting was obsolete in the face of LED Technology.
Essentially, LED Lightings’ debut was fouled by the glaring (literally) problem of garish lighting, and a mixture of clever marketing which made LED Lighting unappealing to very many consumers. However, things have changed a lot since.
Almost 40 years after the 1980s, LED Lighting has come on leaps and bounds, and there are a number of projects which use LED Lighting in order to prove that the old idea of strict, oppressive, bleak and stark LED Lighting is over. While LED Lighting just simply was not ready when it was introduced to the world in the late 1980s, now it more than certainly is. Each colour which can be provided with lighting has well over 2000 variations, and there are far more lighting variants with LED Lighting nowadays than CFL and Halogen Lighting combined.
Church lighting is one of the projects which architects look to add to their portfolios the most, as the buildings involved are certainly unusual compared to modern architecture, and crammed full of bespoke features which are both interesting and absolutely timeless. Dramatic lighting can be instrumental in showing off the assets of these buildings, and very many design portfolios are starting to include churches as part of modern technology meeting classic design beautifully.
