Photograph by David Torrence
The towering bust of the iconic civil-rights leader—arms crossed, a determined expression on his face—demands most of the attention at D.C.’s new Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial. But what strikes Randy Burkett is the subtle nuance of the nearby 450-foot-long inscription wall, with excerpts of King’s stirring speeches in oversize letters.
“Rather than lighting it in a fairly straightforward way, we came up with a way of lighting it from the ground, so that when you approach it, it’s fairly dramatic,” says the founder and namesake of Randy Burkett Lighting Design. The other effect is less obvious: Spill light softly illuminates visitors’ faces, casting an otherworldly glow as people read King’s words. “We wanted people to feel that they are in the presence of something that is very different than they are used to living.”
Burkett—who looks a bit like actor Toby Jones, though with glasses and less hair—is a master of manipulating light to stir emotion. As an architectural-engineering major at Penn State, he spent a semester in York, England, studying how changes in light altered York Minster cathedral’s appearance throughout the day. After college, he found a job at a Denver light manufacturer—learning to speak the language of engineers, contractors, and architects—before moving to St. Louis to work at architecture firm HOK in 1980. Eight years later, during a time when U.S. lighting-design companies were located almost exclusively on the coasts, he launched his own firm. He’s since illuminated some of St. Louis’ most beloved sites: Citygarden, Art Hill, the James S. McDonnell Planetarium, the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, The Chase Park Plaza, Grand Center, Old Post Office Plaza…
Oh, and did we mention a certain steel monument on the riverfront?
Today, it’s easy to forget that for nearly 40 years the Arch remained mostly dark at night, largely because of the challenges of lighting a 630-foot structure. “You would light it one way and stand somewhere and it would look great, then drive two blocks to the south and say, ‘Is it on yet?’ or get a glare,” recalls Burkett. It took months of drawings, models, and mockups to reach a solution: a carefully arranged system of floodlights, with 44 lighting fixtures in four subterranean pits. Even now, it’s hard for Burkett to simply stand back and admire his work. “Frankly, wanting to get out and change the occasional lamp that’s burned out or refocus something slightly is more compelling to me.”
When the monumental project was completed in 2001, it garnered international acclaim, paving the way for work in places like Malaysia, Moscow, and Mexico City—though Burkett already had clients far beyond Missouri. “Between 80 and 90 percent of our work is either repeat clients or referral work,” he says, noting that the firm did practically no marketing until 2008, when the economy flattened. “We wanted to keep [the firm] small, so I could always keep my hands in projects.”
And those projects—restaurants, hotels, offices, parks, museums, monuments, zoo exhibits—call for an array of approaches. Sometimes the priority is sustainability, a motivation that’s elevated the role of the lighting-design industry in recent years. Other times, the goal is to create a vibrant atmosphere, as with Lumière Place Casino. And in some instances, it can be a matter of life and death, as with the Saint Louis Zoo’s Penguin & Puffin Coast, whose lighting reflects the animals’ actual habitats by changing throughout the year, so as not to disrupt their molting and reproductive patterns. Among Burkett’s most exciting local projects on the horizon: Kiener Plaza. “We hope for it to be almost a continuation, in a sense, of the success of Citygarden…and there’s more for [Gateway Mall] planned.”
In every project, public and private, Burkett strikes a balance between science and art, form and function. “Lighting is the consummate discipline,” says Burkett, “for those who can’t make up their mind about whether they want to be a geek or an artist.”
