Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP
Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP is one of Canada’s oldest national business law firms, and its Ottawa office sits a short walk from Parliament Hill, across two floors of World Exchange Plaza on Queen Street. When the firm rebuilt that office with Parallel 45 Design Group, it asked the two floors to do two different jobs — a working floor and a floor for meeting people — on one system that could tell them apart. Flux Lighting designed the lighting and the controls for both, ran the photometric calculations, and supplied the package, the shades included.
A reception that reads as one gesture
The sixth floor is the one clients see. It opens on a reception where a composition of Vibia Tube pendants hangs in three greys over the desk, and the desk itself is edge-lit with concealed Nova Flex tape — the same quiet trick run along the buffet, the catering walls and the lunchroom banquette, so the millwork glows without a fixture in sight. Past reception the plan is a law firm in miniature: four boardrooms, a war room, a lunchroom that doubles as an event space, and rings of patent and trademark offices around the core.
Light that shows the work
A firm like this hangs its art, and the art is lit on purpose. A run of Liteline KLICK track grazes the walls, its heads turned to wash each piece rather than the room — a late change on site added dozens more track heads once the collection was hung. The ambient layer is deliberately invisible: crisp Delta Light Spy accents and trimless downlights disappear into the ceiling, decorative Luminart pendants mark the softer rooms; a sculptural Luceplan Silenzio disc drops felt and light into one gathering space, and Luciole Fiona felt pendants quiet the smaller rooms — pieces chosen to absorb sound as much as cast it, because a floor of glass and hard finishes needs settling. The boardrooms and meeting rooms carry integrated-acoustic linear pendants that light the table and take the edge off a hard room at once. The third floor is the working floor — entry and coffee, focus rooms, and open teams — lit for a long day at a screen rather than for a first impression.
One room, or several
Underneath all of it is a single Lutron Quantum system that runs the lighting and the shades together — one processor, both floors, twenty-two motorized shades on the same network as the light. Occupancy sensing brings each space up as it fills and lets it fall back as it empties; the shades track the sun off the glass; keypads hold four scenes in every boardroom, the lunchroom and the catering space. And where the boardrooms and the lunchroom open into one another on operable walls, infrared partition sensors tell the system the wall has moved, and the lighting re-forms itself — one room or several, with no one touching a control. The audio-visual system recalls its own scenes through the same controller, and emergency and exit lighting covers life safety to code.
A national firm’s office has to be two things at once — a place to do the work and a place to receive the people the work is for. Osler’s Ottawa floors are lit to be both, and to switch between them on their own.
Design by Parallel 45 Design Group.
Photography by Justin Van Leeuwen. .
