restaurant table to be the focus of its partici-
pants’ attention. The result is known as the
balance of brightness.
It is often desirable to light opposite
walls in a space, thereby establishing a bal-
ance of brightness (figure 13.27).Balance
is different from symmetry: lighting the
opposing walls in the same manner is
unnecessary, although one may choose to
do so. Instead, one wall may be uniformly
illuminated with a wall-wash system and the
other will be nonuniformly illuminated with
object lights (figure 13.28).
It is also desirable to balance the perim-
eter illumination of a space with its center. If
a room’s breadth is greater than its height, it
is impossible to light it successfully solely
from the walls. When diffusely lighted walls
are distant from each other in a low-ceil-
inged space and they are the only source of
illumination, the resulting environment is
bland and gloomy. Downlighting is added to
the center; otherwise all persons and objects
in the center of the space will appear in sil-
houette (figure 13.29).
Remember that people interpret the
overall environment chiefly through bright-
ness relationships. Their subjective impres-
sions of visual space are primarily a function
of brightness patterns and pattern organiza-
tion—the relationship of surfaces that are
lighted or left in relative darkness.INTERIOR LIGHTING FOR DESIGNERS
Figure 13.27Lighting opposite walls establishes a balance of brightness.