Enrique Garcia-Carrera speaks on lighting the Manhattan skyline’s iconic Edition Hotel

For more than 100 years, the New York EDITION Hotel (formerly the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower) has graced the New York City skyline. Lighting design firm Fisher Marantz Stone were recently engaged to upgrade the exterior lighting system and help accentuate the tower’s unique cornice.

“The tower had been illuminated for decades as the Met Life headquarters, but the idea was to create something that would be distinct from that, which would announce the hotel and the tower as an architectural element in the city,” explains Associate Principal Enrique García Carrera. “The new lighting also had to take into consideration guests’ needs by minimizing stray light into the guest rooms located in the upper floors of the tower.”

García Carrera and his team used crisp, white light to distinguish the new exterior lighting scheme from the previous, color-changing system – a hybrid of metal halide, fluorescent and high-pressure sodium floodlights. “This is a sophisticated, high-end hotel brand, and the owners and designers have a minimalist aesthetic. A calming, elegant application of white light seemed, therefore, to be the best approach,” he notes.

Read more at Lumenpulse.