Speirs + Major has won a Scottish Design Award for its lighting of the historical furnaces of Sands Bethworks in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The Awards, held since 1998, celebrate the best achievements in Scottish architecture and graphic design.

Speirs + Major’s winning design was for the disused steelworks of the Sands Resort in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. No longer in use as manufacturing plant, the site has been preserved as a monument to a bygone era of American industrial prominence.

To honour this legacy, Speirs + Major designed a lighting scheme rooted in ideas of manufacturing: programmable LEDs illuminate the structures, with shades of red and blue used to express hot and cool processes. The furnaces appear to smoulder, intensifying in colour as they ‘heat’ up, before cooling off and returning to darkness for periods. In this way, light plays a role in linking the site to its industrial past – preserving the integrity of the steelworks and celebrating their place in American industrial history.