The LEED Gold Center for the Arts at New Mexico State University serves as a new artistic hub on the campus – a place where students can both create and congregate. The building contains rehearsal spaces, classrooms, gathering areas, and a 450-seat theater. The Center’s lighting celebrates its rough-hewn aesthetic, forms, and colors of the local desert landscape, expansively incorporating daylight.

The central challenges on this project were its extremely low budget, its structure, and its quirky architecture. In response to these challenges, the lighting design makes creative use of standard and custom fixtures, creating theatrical and playful lighting schemes that complement the inventive architecture. Despite the use of halogen lamps for acoustic and financial reasons, the lighting’s energy usage is 24% under code allowance.