Museum and exhibition lighting

In a museum the influence of light is direct: poor lighting compromises the reading of a work, and well-studied lighting amplifies the experience of whoever stands before it. The studio designs museum and exhibition lighting that lets the art be seen, leads the visitor and keeps within the rules of conservation.

The route is drawn in hierarchies: general light, accent light, detail light. There are points of focus, transitions of lower contrast and visual pauses between rooms, so that a visitor is led without being told where to go. Colour temperature can follow the collection. At MACAM the visit begins with warm, directional light, as though the works were being seen by candlelight, and moves forward in time with the works towards the cool, brutalist light of the rooms holding the most contemporary pieces.

Conservation sets the limits. The exposure of the fragile pieces is limited, reflections and glare are dealt with work by work, and only sources of very high colour rendering are used, above CRI 95 at MACAM. The fittings disappear into the architecture, and the whole installation stays adjustable for the curatorship still to come: a museum changes its exhibitions, and the lighting has to change with it. In the temporary galleries a grid of tracks and spotlights that can be moved and aimed easily fits whichever exhibition comes.

MACAM, the Museu de Arte Contemporânea Armando Martins, opened in Lisbon in 2025 in an eighteenth-century palace on Rua da Junqueira, with more than two thousand square metres of modern and contemporary art, a hotel and a restaurant. The studio designed the whole of its lighting, architectural and museographic, from the galleries holding Almada Negreiros, Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso and Vieira da Silva to the facades, and tuned it room by room with the curator Adelaide Ginga and her team. The rehabilitation of the palace, by MetroUrbe, received the Prémio Gulbenkian Património 2025.