Edge-X™ Technology Now Illuminates
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Rich and Nancy Kinder Building
An Edge-X™ Q-Wall luminaire installation project.
QuarkStar lights up a galaxy of art.
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QuarkStar is the primary gallery lighting supplier for the centerpiece building of the largest museum project in North America.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston's Rich and Nancy Kinder Building.
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The Nancy and Rich Kinder Building |
Largest museum project in North America in 2020.
The Kinder building is the centerpiece of the $450 million campus expansion and redevelopment project of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. |
Task of illumination for the galleries.
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Gallery lighting in a world-class museum face the most rigorous challenges of high-performance lighting seen by the industry, especially when paired with the ground-breaking architectural design of Steven Holl.
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Interior gallery walls need to be illuminated uniformly from top to bottom so that art pieces do not have to compete for attention against background light gradations. And the illumination needs to be seamless with daylight introduced through architectural design. The illumination solution needs to vanish into the architecture and also be cost effective, using only single rows of fixtures.
All of this together has been extremely difficult to do with conventional lighting technologies.
Wall illumination like no other.
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QuarkStar pulled it off – doing something never before seen in the lighting world.
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16-ft sheets of light.
The Kinder galleries feature 16-ft walls, requiring an extraordinary evenness of illumination to keep the focus on the art. Q-Wall was up for this challenge with optics designed for canvasing warehouse-height walls with evenly distributed sheets of light. |
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Uniformity.
The extraordinary uniformity produced by the Q-Wall fixture allows for the MFAH’s expansive gallery walls to be uniformly lit from top-to-bottom.
This uniformity ratio is setting a new Industry standard. Infinite runs.
With Q-Wall, infinite runs are a breeze. Configurable to any wall length, providing consistent wall illumination for the entire run length.
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Press.
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Ground-breaking optics debut in £330 million art gallery
LUX Review January 2021 |
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QuarkStar's Q-Wall fixtures provide exhibit wall illumination for the majority of galleries that depend on artificial lighting.
Ground Floor
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2nd Floor
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Gallery Height
ft
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Wall Coverage*
Percent
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Wall Space Illuminated
sq ft
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* of galleries lit primarily
by artificial lighting
by artificial lighting
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We're proud to have the Kinder Building as the debut of Edge-X
The largest museum project in North America is the ultimate proving ground for a new lighting technology |
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Daylight 24 hours.
The Q-Wall fixture easily mimics the Texas daylight entering the windows at MFAH with its inherent color mixing and dual tunable LED channels.
It's daylight on demand with Q-Wall. |
Inherent color mixing.
Seamless color mixing is built right into the Edge-X™ Q-Wall optical engine, which completely mixes the dual 5000K and 3000K LED channels before the light even leaves the fixture – all from a single row of LEDs. Standard lighting technologies can only produce well-mixed light in the far field. Flawless color mixing with color tuning simplifies the art museum technicians' job to ensure daylight color matching.
Bridging natural and artificial lighting.
The lighting effects of the Kinder building’s unique and pioneering architectural skylights were recreated within the lower galleries using QuarkStar's Q-Wall. This was only possible with Q-Wall's abilities to produce perfectly mixed, color-tuned light starting in the near-field and sculpted into a near perfect even sheet of light - all from a single row of LEDs in a fixture so small, it could be tucked neatly away into the architecture.
Walls illuminated by giant skylights
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Walls lit by 1" Q-Wall fixture
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Wall washing without glare.
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Light is only projected where it is needed with Edge-X™ Q-Wall fixtures. The MFAH Kinder galleries are large and open, and required a fixture that would reduce any possible glare to visitors to ensure a distraction free environment. With Q-Wall fixtures, precision wall washing is achieved.
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Compact and hidden.
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The Kinder galleries required a minimal fixture profile to reduce visual distraction without impacting wall illumination. The compact size of the Edge-X™ Q-Wall allowed for the coves in galleries to be reduced in size allowing for architecture to be more consistent to the original vision.
Tight dimensional requirements are not a problem for the Q-Wall fixture. Q-Wall needs only a 2 cm opening to fully operate. |
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The Fixture.
This is our most advanced luminaire ever.
Q-Wall achieves 1:3 wall uniformity using patented Edge-X™ optical technology. The linear surface mount Q-Wall features a precision engineered asymmetrical output optic, a minimal profile, and infinite runs of uniform wall illumination. Wall illumination compared to no other.
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Edge-X Tech Overview
QuarkStar's award-winning Edge-X technology family is a modular scalable technology capable of sculpting light in space like nothing seen before. Edge-X is based on an Edge-coupled Edge-extracting Waveguide, which had not been seen in lighting prior to QuarkStar.
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Edge-X Applications & Distributions
QuarkStar has expanded the Edge-X optical technology to cover many lighting applications. Explore the resulting sculpted distributions, with results from independent testing labs.
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See it for yourself.
QuarkStar welcomes you to see our Edge-X™ Q-Wall luminaire fixtures in action. The Kinder Building at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is only a 15 minute drive from downtown Houston, USA.
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View Our Virtual Tour
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*Amount of gallery walls that use artificial lighting for their primary illumination.
