When the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) Office of Applied Science asked engineering megafirm Arup to do a simple lighting study for a new federal courthouse in Jackson, Mississippi, the client did not anticipate that an overhaul of its design methods would ensue. Traditionally, when planning a new courtroom, the GSA has used plywood mock-ups of key components to test parameters such as sight lines. This method has certain benefits—primarily, the fact that one can walk around and sit in the model. However, the mockups are costly and represent only fragments of the courtroom. Critically, they also exclude information about lighting and materials. So for the Jackson job, the GSA decided to test the lighting scenarios on a 3-D computer model.
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