August 17, 2026
IES26 Winners Illuminate More Than Architecture
Projects reveal the human stories behind exceptional lighting design
DENVER — The IES Illumination Awards rarely produce a moment where two continents collide in a hotel ballroom, but that's what happened Friday night at IES26, when a California-based lighting designer stood at the podium, abandoned his prepared remarks, and turned to thank a Japanese stranger sitting at the front table.
Emanuel Treeson's firm, NYXdesign, working with BRC Imagination Arts, pulled off something the Illumination Awards program rarely allows: two Awards of Distinction in a single night, for SCADstory in Atlanta and the USA Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka. A single Award of Distinction is already a high bar. Two, for the same firm, is not something judges hand out casually.
But the story Treeson told wasn't about his own work. He said he scrapped most of his planned remarks after seeing another Osaka project on the winners list: the Expo 2025 Osaka Grand Ring Lighting, an Award of Excellence recipient involving a consortium of Japanese firms including Obayashi Corporation and Panasonic.
Treeson told the room he walked beneath that ring every day, commuting from his hotel to his own project site. Then he turned and spoke directly to the Grand Ring's design team, seated nearby, and thanked them for work he said he'd admired from the ground up, literally, for months.
Hiroyasu Shoji of the Osaka Grand Ring Lighting team with Emanuel Treeson, who walked beneath Shoji's ring every day commuting to his own USA Pavilion project at Expo 2025.
A Reckoning in Brazil
If Treeson's moment was about proximity, Mariana Novaes' was about distance, and the seven years it took to close it. Novaes, of Atiaîa Lighting Design, accepted an Award of Distinction for Memorial Brumadinho, a project commemorating the 2019 dam collapse in Minas Gerais, Brazil, that killed 270 people.
Novaes opened by asking the audience, in a stoic Portuguese-accented address the room grew quiet for, whether she was even allowed to feel happy about a project rooted in something so sad. She has lived most of her life near the site. The tension in that question, joy sitting uneasily beside grief, landed harder than any rehearsed acceptance speech about lighting design choices would have.
The Field, By the Numbers
IES recognized 17 projects this year: four Awards of Distinction, nine Awards of Excellence, and four Special Citations. Eleven of the 17 were U.S.-based, spanning Brooklyn to San Diego, Omaha to Greenville. The rest reached into Brazil, Japan, China, Macau, and Dubai.
NYXdesign/BRC Imagination Arts was the only firm to double up, and did so at the top tier.
What Local Sections Already Knew
None of this arrived without warning for lighting people who'd been paying attention. Treeson's SCADstory and Osaka Pavilion projects had already collected awards at Lumen West 2026 in June, when the Los Angeles and Orange County IES sections gathered at the Skirball Cultural Center.
Above: Emcee Sara Schonauer looks on as Emanuel Treeson accepts the Award of Distinction on behalf of NYXdesign and BRC Imagination Arts for SCADstory at Lumen West 2026.
The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum, meanwhile, had already taken top honors, the Lighthouse Award, at Boston's Illumination Awards in May.
