Meet Our Member

The IESNYC spotlights a member each month whose volunteerism, perspectives or personal story helps advance our goals, pique our curiosity, and whose contributions help the IESNYC become a more vibrant and diverse lighting community. We value their expertise and thank them for volunteering their time and energy for the betterment of the section and NYC Lighting Community. #the_iesnycmom

July 2023

Gabe Guilliams, LC, CLD, IES, IALD, LEED AP BD+C
Partner, Buro Happold

Q: How did you first get started in the lighting industry?
As a kid, I was always fascinated by math and really liked building: treehouses and skateboard ramps, you name it. When I was 14, I started working building and renovating single-family houses and loved it. As I started my college search, I was looking at architecture and engineering programs, and a visit to the AE program at the University of Kansas made my mind up. I originally intended to be a structural engineer, but a few years of architecture studio fed my fascination for form, material, and light. I had the good fortune to take several lighting classes, and then a photography course where I really learned to see and compose light. After my first internship with HOK’s lighting team in St. Louis, I was hooked! 

I’ve continued to hone my photography hobby over the last 25 years and find two genres particularly satisfying: photographing people (my kids) and architecture (mostly my projects). There are many good architectural photographers, but not nearly as many who successfully capture light in buildings.

Photography has informed my lighting design tremendously, from framing views to layering light. A student learning with black and white film sees how the relative balance of light and darkness create composition. The dynamic range of the camera is narrower than the human eye, which heightened my sensitivity to contrast. Once I attuned to this, I became hypersensitive to glare conditions in my work and very purposefully began choosing high-contrast moments to support atmosphere, placemaking, and drawing focus. 

Q: How do you see the role of the IESNYC?
The lighting ecosystem in NYC is one of the best, and IESNYC is at the heart of it. It’s a great connector: bringing together folks from all sides of our industry to share what we know and what we’re learning about light. Webinars, project tours, and the Lumen Awards consistently remind me of how incredible the professional camaraderie is here in New York. I always learn something new and fascinating from the projects and professionals that are recognized at the Lumens. I had the privilege of contributing as one of the Lumen Judges this year. It was a joy and an honor to join that prestigious jury, and I gained a new appreciation for industry perspectives, particularly from the jurors who work in very different sectors than I.

Lighting people are terrific. I learned a lot from Tom Kaczkowski at HOK. I remember building a small mockup with this experimental product from a company called Color Kinetics in the late nineties and being mind-blown. I was always inspired by two Arup colleagues: Rogier van der Heide for his creativity and forward thinking, and Andy Sedgwick for his boundless enthusiasm for daylight.

A Primary Passion
Over the past 4 years or so, I’ve been working with my client at Grace Farms on an initiative to eradicate modern slavery from global construction supply chains. Forced labor is estimated as a $150B criminal industry worldwide. It is a tremendously challenging issue – from accessing data and validating it, to understanding the social and political ramifications of exposing it. 

About 2 years into this work, we recognized an opportunity to build an open-source platform that could provide transparency on the extraction of raw materials and the manufacture and transport of common construction materials. This will enable the design industry to make more informed choices, with the aim to reduce the probability of embodied slavery in our projects. Our office has teamed with the Yale School of Architecture and KieranTimberlake. We have a proof of concept, are wrapping up industry peer reviews, and will seek research funding in the coming months. I imagine we still have a decade ahead of us on this one!

IESNYC has the connections and clout to lift up this social justice issue with lighting manufacturers and specifiers. And with the enthusiasm of a few esteemed colleagues, the IES and IESNYC can provide education and smooth the path toward designing to reduce forced labor. We’re seeing similar initiatives at work already with equity in lighting and the circular economy. IESNYC is a powerful force, and an index of human suffering for lighting materials will become the next issue requiring our community’s support.