Ray Grenald (born 1928) is an architectural lighting designer in the United States in the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries.
Grenald founded his own lighting design firm, Grenald Associates, in Philadelphia in 1968. In 1994, it became Grenald-Waldron Associates.
Grenald was born in 1928 in Louisville, Kentucky as Raymond Greenwald. He attended DuPont Manual High School, graduating in two-and-a-half years rather than the usual four. He then attended the University of Cincinnati until he enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1946. At the conclusion of his army service, he attended Washington State University on the GI Bill, majoring in aeronautical engineering. He worked for Boeing in that capacity, and also served in the Army during the Korean War era. He then returned to school to get a degree in Architecture at the University of Washington.
Following graduation, he moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and became a practicing architect for the next 14 years. In that capacity, he won international recognition for his lighting designs, and in 1968 opened his own firm specializing in architectural lighting design. The move would make him one of the founding members of a new profession. He also became one of the founders of the International Association of Lighting Designers (IALD) in 1969.[1] During his career he has served as president of the IALD and is currently on the board of directors for the National Lighting Research Organization.
He was elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects in 1985, is a founder and past president of the IALD, and has chaired the IES's national committee on museum and art lighting. Long active in professional education, Grenald has served as a faculty member or visiting lecturer at more than a dozen major universities, including the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, Yale University, the University of Southern California, and the Moore College of Art, and has been a board member of the Lighting Research Institute.