French architectural firm BETILLON / DORVAL-BORY has created the Appartement Spectral. Completed in 2013, this 215 square foot contemporary apartment in Paris, France, was designed with with an emphasis on lighting. Due to a lack of natural light, the implementation of artificial lighting systems was carefully studied. Spectral apartment is a renovation project of a small Parisian studio, in which the lack of natural light led the client to ask us to intervene particularly on the issue of artificial light. To do this, we chose to adopt a radical and binary approach by studying the spectral qualities of two different sources of artificial light. This system is extremely popular because of its particularly high efficiency (amount of light compared to consumed electricity) and it is used for the illumination of cities along the streets, roads and highways. Its characteristic color temperature gives this particular orangey shade to our nocturnal urban environment. However, these lamps have the lowest CRI, close to 0. This means that the light is monochromatic, in a wavelength of 589.3 nm, and cannot render any other color.
