10-60 I E S LIGHTING HANDBOOK

Service Areas
Mail room. For the variety of seeing tasks encountered in a mail room,
30 footcandles of uniformly distributed illumination is recommended.
Corridors and passageways. Any passageways not separated from the
working space by high partitions should have the same general illumina-
tion as the rest of the office space. In corridors and passageways having
high partitions, lower levels of illumination may be adequate. If the
partitions are of glass so that the lighting equipment is visible from the
rest of the office, the same restrictions with respect to brightness of the
luminaires should be observed as in general office space. Outlets should
be placed at locations such as corridor intersections, in front of elevator
doors, and at the top and bottom of stairways. Luminaire spacing
should not exceed about 1^ times the mounting height to achieve a
reasonable degree of uniformity.
Stairways. Luminaires in stairways should be located so that persons
do not cast shadows of themselves over the stairs, so that stairway treads
are not in shadow, and so that glare at eye level is avoided. In general,
an overhead luminaire should be located at each landing. The arrange-
ment should be such that adequate illumination will be provided after
allowing for the failure of any one lamp. Recessed luminous elements in
the walls near the floor often are advisable near landings and especially
where one or two steps connect different elevations in corridors. A
change in the color of the floor or baseboard at these locations also will
assist in calling attention to the change in elevation of the floor level.
Lavatories. In these areas a general lighting system which will provide
not less than 10 footcandles is recommended. Mirror lighting is desirable
in rest rooms and wash rooms. (See the discussion of bathroom lighting,
page 10-43.)
STORE LIGHTING
No field of lighting presents as many or as diverse problems to the
designer as that of lighting the modern store. No two stores are alike.
They range in size from small one-man operated shops to large department
stores with hundreds of employees. The merchandise displayed and sold
in these areas varies in size from needles to automobiles, in texture from
polished metalware to wool blankets, in reflectance from black worsteds
to white sheets, and through all the colors of the rainbow. Some kinds of
merchandise are transparent or translucent, others opaque. Vertical
surfaces are the important ones to be appraised in some cases, in others it
is the oblique, rounded, or horizontal surface that the customer inspects
when buying. It is evident that the store-lighting designer must be
versatile and able to apply all the lighting tools and techniques.
To make its full contribution to successful, profitable merchandising,
store lighting should be planned not only to provide favorable conditions
for rapid and accurate evaluation of the inherent qualities of merchandise,
but also to attract attention to the store, to dramatize the store and its