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A TRUE INNOVATOR IN SPIRIT AND PRACTICE, RICHARD KELLY (1910-77) DEDICATED his professional life to the recognition and advancement of lighting design, and throughout his career, championed a close partnership between light and architecture. This was far from accepted practice when Kelly opened his first lighting consultancy in 1935 in New York City. As he described this period, "There weren't lighting consultants then. Nobody would pay for my ideas, but they would buy fixtures." Frustrated, Kelly began to write and lecture on the integral relationship between lighting and architecture, giving voice and name to the emerging practice of lighting design. By the early 1950s, Kelly had defined a vocabulary for modern architectural lighting design comprised of three "light energy impacts": focal glow (highlight), ambient luminescence (graded washes), and play of brilliants (sharp detail). As an educator lecturing at institutions including Yale, Princeton, and Harvard, Kelly shared his philosophy of light with the next generation of lighting designers-establishing a legacy still visible today.





