James Benya Recognized by IES San Francisco Section with The Sol Cohn Award for Lifetime Achievement
By Clifton Stanley Lemon
From left to right: Sima Tawakoli, IES SF Section President; Deborah Burnett; James Benya; Clifton Stanley Lemon, IES SF Past President.
The Sol Cohn Award is presented for lifetime service to lighting. This IES San Francisco Section Award was created by the Golden Gate Section (which eventually became San Francisco Section) to honor Sol Cohn, a longtime member of the Section and President in 1950 and 1951. Sol was the Specification Manager and an officer of California Electric Supply, and was a major influence on lighting work in the Bay Area. The award was first presented in 1979 and in recent years has recognized many prominent Bay Area lighting colleagues, including Stephen Selkowitz, Francis Rubenstein, Peter Ngai, Phillip Hall, Michael Souter, Patricia Glasow, Charles Knuffke, and Rick Miller. This year’s recipient is in many ways long overdue for this and many other forms of recognition for their wide ranging contributions to the lighting, building, and energy industries.
I first met our recipient seven years ago at the beginning of the real ramp-up of SSL. We had hired them to write a white paper detailing the advances of a product made by the company I was with at the time as Marketing Manager. The paper was to be a big part of our spectacular product launch. This product for the first time met all of the important lighting requirements for LEDs: performance, efficiency, and most of all, full spectrum quality of light. The mood at the time was that we as a tiny wet-behind-the-ears startup were so fortunate to have one of the Titans of the industry bless us with their presence. At the time, I was coming from working in a deep-green MEP firm and was somewhat amazed at the lack of understanding and focus on energy efficiency. Back then we were struggling to break 40-50 lumens per watt, to simply show that a high quality LED light source was even technically and commercially viable. And we were so lucky to have this person help us out.
I was in a meeting with the product manager, a salesperson and our distinguished recipient. In the meeting I proceeded to ask a lot of questions, to the thinly disguised irritation of my colleagues, but I was still learning and could see what we had to do from a much larger perspective that they didn’t understand. After the meeting, the salesperson pulled me aside and said something to the effect of “you should keep your mouth shut. I bring almost nothing to this discussion - you bring even less.” After coming from a situation where, over 6 years, I was regularly dissed overtly for being a non-engineer and covertly for being old (as in over 30), this slimy comment didn’t do much for my self esteem, and as it turned out was not only inappropriate but spectacularly wrong. Discrimination for being either old or a non-engineer is a defining characteristic of both engineering and Silicon Valley culture – for instance the VC bigshot Vinod Khosla famously remarked once that no one over 45 ever has a useful idea. Refreshingly this is less prevalent in the lighting industry, at least for now.
What did do something for my self esteem, quite a large something ultimately, was the subsequent encouragement I received from our recipient. At some point in our careers those of us who are passionate, geeked, out, want to build something, help people and have an impact – in short pretty much everyone I know lighting – feel like we don’t fit in, that we’re chasing stuff nobody cares about or understands because we see the future clearly and relentlessly work on the hard problems. Acceptance, collaboration, and encouragement are not guaranteed – sadly, they often seem to be in short supply. I began hearing from this person positive things about myself that seemed at first kind of overblown, and I couldn’t quite believe them, coming from such a prominent, articulate, and deeply knowledgeable figure in the industry. They were saying that we were cut from the same cloth, birds of a feather, stuff like that. Eventually this had a big impact on me and I am deeply grateful for this encouragement as it has enabled me to keep working toward something big and fabulous, I’m still not sure exactly what this is yet but am becoming clearer all the time, and with this person’s partnership and collaboration I know it will happen.
It’s my self-appointed responsibility to inform all you kids out there about our local lighting history in the Bay Area, of which this person is a pivotal figure. There is a certain contingent I think of as the Founding Fabulous- the Original Gangsters of Lighting Design, including, but by no means limited to, Fran Kellog Smith, Naomi Miller, Jan Moyer, Nancy McCoy, Michael Souter, David Malman, Randall Whitehead, and our illustrious recipient. Together they carried on the work of pioneers like Richard Kelly, using projector lightbulbs (MR16s) to create dramatic directional low voltage lighting, and creating much of what we recognize today as the lighting design profession. Their story must and will be told in due time.
To give a brief sketch of career highlights and other datapoints of sheer fabulousness, our recipient can be partially described as such: architectural lighting designer with 40 years of experience over a broad range of project types. Fellow of IALD and IESNA. Past Editor at Large for Architectural Lighting Magazine and Professor of Environmental Design at University of California, Davis. Current projects emphasize sustainable design with over 40 projects LEED rated including 3 Net Zero Energy, 14 Platinum, 19 Gold and 22 Silver. Expertise in daylighting design, high efficiency controls, and PV integration. Project types include churches, civic plazas, hospitality, education, transportation, residential, casino, multi-family, health care, museum and gallery, and major facade and exterior projects. Our recipient is also very well known for their tireless work on California’s energy code, especially the lighting sections, and on curtailing outdoor light pollution.
But in this short space it’s impossible to even summarize this career which has been long, prodigious, productive, and touched so many people and institutions, and is still raging on. By now many of you have probably guessed that I’m talking about Mr. James Benya.
I will share this contribution from my his dear friend, and mine, Jan Moyer, who goes way back with Jimbo:
“Jim Benya discovered me as a baby lighting designer when I was working at GE’s Nela Park Lighting Institute. He brought me to meet Steve Squillace at Smith, Hinchman and Grylls in Detroit Michigan in 1977 (which eventually became the Smith Group). After an 8 hour interview and my accepting the position in The Lighting Group, Jim helped me understand how an architecture firm worked; he guided me through lighting evaluations and research projects. After I moved to California, the IES asked me to give a presentation at the Michigan Regional Conference. I told them I would do it if Jim and I could do it together. We then did that presentation for the IES around the country and LD&A published an article about it - Designers or Engineers, who is the right one for a project? We thought it took both.
Jim became my partner at Luminae in San Francisco in the early 1980’s. He wanted to take over the world, and he kept bringing in great partners - Naomi Johnson Miller, Ross DeAlessi and eventually Michael Souter, making the company Luminae Souter.
As you may know, Jim was a maverick and really cares about the lighting industry. He worked with multiple local, regional, and national agencies on issues affecting our industry - including California’s Title 24 and the Dark Skies initiative, just to name two. He always has his eyes and his efforts in the future making sure that lighting quality isn’t shoved aside – who doesn’t thank him for his work with Soraa?
Back at that conference in 1982, Jim introduced me to Michael Hooker, who became my life partner until his early death in the 1990s. Jim was always thinking about each of us and making sure we were OK.
Even though I don’t get to see Jim much these days, I think of him with love always and when we are together, it is like time has not separated us for even a moment. Congratulations on a very fruitful career that I am honored to have been part of with you for a tiny portion.”
I am blessed to be able to count on Jim for a 30 minute to 3 hour discussion on anything and everything at least once every 2 weeks. If there’s something I don’t understand about energy, electricity, regulatory institutions, wiring, networks, BUG, streetlights, light pollution, or dozens of other topics, he’s the first person I call. He may like Mr. Ed the horse, who “never talks unless he has something to say,” yet has a reputation for holding forth at length precisely because he always has something to say.
There are two main qualities about Jim I appreciate. The first is referenced by a quote attributed to John Maynard Keynes: “when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, Sir?” I eventually realized that this is something Jim regularly does, and it’s a rare quality, you might call it an appreciation for evidence-based design. The second is his generous encouragement and dedication to helping others, myself included, succeed and thrive.
We at IESSF were unanimous in bestowing this award upon this eminent and richly deserving member of our community, and expect that much more such recognition, commensurate with his accomplishments, contributions, and stature, is forthcoming.