The Office of Academic Affairs awarded Josefina Ortuzar ’22 (MPSL), who worked on the capstone project featured on this page, the Chairman’s Award for her overall performance at NYSID. At NYSID, capstone projects are long journeys that challenge students to brainstorm, conduct research, and synthesize all they have learned. The journey ends with a presentation to a jury of faculty and industry professionals. Our students work closely with faculty to create hypothetical designs that offer solutions to real-world problems.

Student: Josefina Ortuzar
Project: Lake Louise Hotel
Program: Master of Professional Studies in Lighting Design
Instructor: Nathalie Faubert & Jason Livingston

Josefina Ortuzar envisioned her lighting thesis set in a luxury hotel on Lake Louise, located in Banff National Park, Canada. She chose this wild location because it’s one of the places in the world most free of light pollution, a getaway known for its clear night skies full of bright stars and views of the Northern Lights. Ortuzar’s guiding concepts for the lighting plan of this fictional hotel were “connecting the indoors to the outdoors’’ and “light and shadow rhythm.” Usually, lighting designers employ controls to bring the lights up as the sun goes down, but Ortuzar dimmed the lights to the minimum standards of what one needs at night, in order to create clear views of the starry sky outside the hotel. The lighting plan is intended to prevent light from shining directly in the eyes of the end user, or creating a reflection on glass, all in the service of not detracting from the scenery outside. Most of the light in the space is concealed and indirect. The light from the ceiling is concealed in wooden beams. Light bounces off the ceiling at a 45-degree angle onto the floor, creating a kind of wayfinding in ceiling of the corridors. The indoor lounge is meant to have the feel of an outdoor firepit, and the light comes from fixtures underneath benches or up high, in the beams or at the top of columns, so there are no visible fixtures at eye level to occlude the view to the skies. Ortuzar, currently an interior designer at Tihany Design, is enjoying bringing her new expertise in lighting design into the luxury hospitality spaces she designs.