Edison Price Lighting

Founded in 1952, Edison Price Lighting designs and manufactures architectural lighting fixtures, used in museums, art galleries, offices, residences, and similar locations. The firm's signature low-glare, unobtrusive track and recessed fixtures—especially their recessed downlights, track lighting, and linear wall-grazing systems—were the first in the industry, and helped define modern lighting. Edison Price Lighting fixtures are known for their sleek, minimal style, which blends into the architecture rather than attract attention.

For nearly 50 years, Edison Price Lighting operated in New York City’s Upper East Side neighborhood. In 2001, the company moved across the East River to Long Island City (LIC), Queens. It operates a nearly 50,000 square-foot in-house factory, manufacturing $20 million in product annually. All materials are sourced locally, and the company meets the “Made in NY” and “Made in USA” criteria.

Products

Edison Price Lighting designs and manufactures track systems, track lights, recessed down lights, accent lights, wall washers, using a variety of lamp technologies, such as LED Led, CFL, low-voltage, PAR, and HID. Standard products are manufactured on a made-to-order basis, with stored inventory. The company also customizes fixtures, working with lighting designers.

Edison Price Lighting increasingly develops fixtures using LED technology, producing 11 new LED fixtures between November 2010 and April 2014. The company manufacturers museum-quality LEDs, using Xicato-powered LED modules with a Color-Rendering Index of 97.

Edison Price Lighting designed the industry’s first LED combination downlight/wallwasher, including a “dim-to-warm” incandescent-style dimming option.

Founder

The founder of Edison Price Lighting, Edison Avery Price (1935-1997), was an American lighting designer, craftsman, and consultant. Price was a “genius who made the most perfect architecture lighting equipment,” according to Howard Brandston, an award-winning lighting designer himself.

Edison began his career when working for his family’s theater lighting company, Display Stage Lighting, in 1935, at the age of 17. After studying the Society of Illuminating Engineers’ technical journals, Price became an expert in manipulating light. In 1952, Price left his family company and began work as an independent designer and manufacturer.

Price believed that lighting fixtures should be designed to meet architectural needs, instead of compete with a building’s design. According to lighting consultant and longtime collaborator Claude R. Engle, Price first questioned “what lighting the architectural design called for, and [then] develop[ed] fixtures that achieved those goals."

Working as Price’s associate, the mathematician Isaac Goodbar calculated the precise coordinates of light’s intensity and trajectory. To light Louis Kahn's Kimbell Art Museum in 1972, Goodbar calculated the lighting reflector’s curvature using a computer, marking one of the “first uses of computer technology in either architectural or lighting design.” Such measurements enabled Edison to perfect his trademark unobtrusive, glare-free fixtures. After a career of collaboration, lighting designer Richard Kelly remarked that, “the subtlety with which [Price] can control the handling of electric light is simply superb.”

Price’s lighting design services were in such high demand that the company also operated as arguably the “world’s first lighting consultancy."

Collaborations

Price was favored by architects and designers of the International Style. He collaborated with the following architects:

  • Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
  • Philip Johnson
  • I.M. Pei
  • Marcel Breuer
  • Louis Kahn
  • Buckminster Fuller
  • Gunnar Birkerts
  • Louis Skidmore, Nathaniel A. Owings, John O. Merrill
  • Alfonso Eduardo Reidy

Projects

Price designed fixtures for the following famous spaces:

  • A.T.&T. Building (currently Sony Tower)
  • Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX
  • Grand Louvre Le Pyramid, Paris, France
  • Kimbell Art Museum, Ft. Worth, TX
  • Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, NY
  • Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN
  • National Gallery, East Wing, Washington, D.C.
  • Pennzoil Place, Houston, TX
  • Seagram Building, NY, NY
  • United States Pavilion, Expo 67, Montreal, Canada

Edison was awarded the AIA Medal by the American Institute of Architects in 1981, recognizing his as “one who has brighted more excellent architecture than anyone else in history.” In 1990, he received the Illuminating Engineering Society’s Richard Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award.

Edison died October 15, 1997, on the same day that his newest fixtures debuted at a Metropolitan Museum of Art gallery opening.

Notable Edison Price Lighting Museums Projects

Gasgosian Gallery, lit by Edison Price Lighting

Edison Price Lighting has lit over 350 museums and galleries, including:

  • Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
  • Boston Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA
  • Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY
  • The Clark Institute Stone Hill Center, Williamstown, NY
  • The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY
  • Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX
  • Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, CA
  • J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA
  • The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, NY
  • Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI
  • The Minneapolis Institute of Art
  • Morgan Library & Museum, NY, NY (winner of Architectural Lighting 2011 Design Award, Commendable Achievement, Interior Lighting)
  • Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC
  • The Museum of Fine Arts , Houston, TX
  • National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
  • Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA
  • San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX
  • St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO
  • Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
  • United States Holocaust Museum, Washington, D.C.