Architectural Lighting Design (One year) postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

On Sunday afternoons I change light bulbs in my grandfather's kitchen. He has macular degeneration, and over two years we have swapped a single ceiling pendant for under-cabinet strips, a warmer lamp by his chair and a bright, even light over the worktop where he chops vegetables. None of this was sophisticated, but each change altered what he could do on his own. It is the clearest reason I can give for wanting to study architectural lighting design: light decides how people use a room long before they notice the architecture.

My degree in Interior Architecture introduced lighting mostly as a late-stage specification task, chosen from a catalogue once the plan was fixed. I found myself pushing against that order. For my final-year project I took a Victorian church hall in my town that hosts a weekly food bank and proposed a refurbishment. I visited on three distribution days, sketched where volunteers queued, sorted and talked, and noticed that the tall windows left the sorting tables in shadow by late afternoon in winter while the entrance glared. My scheme separated layers: diffuse indirect light from the roof trusses, task lighting over the tables and lower, warmer light in a quiet corner where visitors could sit with an adviser. I used a borrowed lux meter to record existing levels, built a cardboard model to test daylight from the windows, and ran basic calculations in DIALux. My tutors judged the lighting strategy the strongest part of the project, though the modelling also showed me how much I still had to learn about glare control and daylight simulation.

Reading has helped me put names to things I had only noticed. Richard Kelly's distinction between focal glow, ambient luminescence and play of brilliants gave me a vocabulary for the food bank scheme, and Peter Zumthor's short book Atmospheres made me think about light as something people feel rather than simply measure. I would like to understand how these qualitative ideas sit alongside the technical side: photometry, colour rendering, circadian effects and the energy demands that lighting places on buildings.

For the past eighteen months I have worked as a sales assistant in a lighting showroom. Much of the job is ordinary: unpacking stock, processing returns, explaining dimmer compatibility. But it has taught me how many lighting decisions are made by people with no specialist advice, and how often customers return fittings because the colour temperature felt clinical at home or the beam was too narrow for their room. I now ask about room size, ceiling height and what the space is used for before recommending anything, and the number of returns from my customers has noticeably dropped. I have also learned to read datasheets properly and to be honest when a cheaper product would do.

Outside work I am a member of a local astronomy group. On clear nights we drive to a site away from the town, and the difference between the sky there and above my street is striking. It has made me think about light pollution as a design failure rather than an unavoidable cost, and about how outdoor lighting could be better aimed, shielded and timed.

I want a focused year of postgraduate study because I have reached the limit of what I can learn through a design degree, a showroom counter and my own experiments. I hope to develop rigorous technical skills in measurement and simulation, to test ideas in full-scale mock-ups rather than cardboard models, and to work with people from architecture, engineering and other backgrounds. Longer term, I would like to work in a lighting practice on public and community buildings, where the people who use a space every week, like the food bank volunteers or my grandfather at his worktop, are the ones the design is really for.