Joe Ranahan lights up Northeastern’s Boston campus. Literally
Joe Ranahan is the director of energy at Northeastern. He is also the guy who lights up buildings around Northeastern’s Boston campus in honor of special events and to convey messages.
During the day, Joe Ranahan ensures Northeastern University’s room temperatures stay comfortable, lights turn on and off, and other automated systems are in check.
But at night, his work really shines.
“They said ‘You turn the lights on and off in my office, why don’t you create light shows?’” Ranahan recalled. “I thought, ‘OK, I can do that.’”
Ranahan is the director of energy at Northeastern and has been at the university 25 years – ever since he was a 28-year-old student supporting his family by working nights at Matthews Arena.
Ranahan is also the guy who lights up buildings around the Boston campus to honor special events and convey messages. He bathed building(s) in blue and yellow to show solidarity with Ukraine; projected snowfall and snowflakes across Krentzman quad at winter break; and, most recently, commemorated the release of Taylor Swift’s latest album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” by interspersing flashes of white light against the orange and green color scheme of the album to mimic camera flashes.
Oh, and he’s also “somewhat colorblind.”
“It doesn’t help,” Ranahan admits, laughing. “I usually lean on the person requesting the show to make sure the color scheme is what they are looking for, and the effect is what they are looking for.”
There are seven arrays of LED lights on Northeastern’s Boston campus that Ranahan can program for light shows: one for each of the three buildings that front Krentzman Quad (Dodge, Ell and Richards halls), one at the Knowles Center; one at the Stearns Center; one lighting up the ISEC bridge; and one lighting up the Centennial Quad sign and flagpole.
The lights were installed in 2022 as part of a campus beautification effort and – because the automation department is in charge of lighting controls – Ranahan “had to figure out what to do with them.”
“We’re a group of troubleshooters,” Ranahan explained. “We love to solve problems.”
So, Ranahan watched internet videos to teach himself how to use the programming software that controls the lights, putting his computer engineering degree from the university to use to manipulate colors, timing, light intensity and shape.
“In most of my light shows l try to get a water effect,” Ranahan says. “I will change the output of light in a sine wave or triangle shape, which helps control the intensity of the light and gives a nice wavy pattern.”
He also counts himself lucky to have Northeastern buildings as a canvas.
“White brick buildings will get the truest rendition of the color,” Ranahan explains. “If you try to light up a red brick building, the red brick will absorb the lumens and reduce the light output and you also have to shift colors – for instance, toning down the red – so that blue shows up as blue.”
And while he describes himself as not “an artistic person” — “I appreciate the hardware, basically,” Ranahan says — he does appreciate the opportunity to indulge his creative side as part of his job.
“Sometimes it’s opening valves and dampers, sometimes it’s more creative,” Ranahan says. “But it’s all important.”