Spectra Stage & Event Technologies, the Swedish Wybron dealer, has completed a permanent lighting installation on the Garantibank headquarters in Istanbul. The exterior of 120m-tall office building now glows with blue and aqua floodlighting.
The Spectra team fitted 28 Wybron outdoor large-format Aquaram colour changers onto Philips ArenaVision MVF 403 1800W HID floodlighting luminaires to drench the stone walls of the bank with colour. As well as delivering exact gel colours, the Aquaram is built to withstand the elements: the control switch panels are water-resistant; the vents shrouded; the circuit board is conformal coated, protecting the electronics; and rubber seals secure the transparent panels over the front and rear apertures.
Additional Philips fixtures with a blue dichroic filter were focused on the centre concrete walls. “While the centre remains a static blue, I wanted the stone walls on either side to move through very specific blue and aqua tones, as if emulating the ocean,” explains Per Sundin, Spectra’s lighting designer.
The 10m flagpole at the top of the building has been lit to add both elegance and functionality to the installation. The pole is covered in 60m of Sweled Ultra Bright LED Neon Flex RGB tubing, and its colour indicates tomorrow’s weather conditions in Istanbul, programmed daily from inside the building.
In order to be able to light the building’s facade, Spectra oversaw the construction of 28 custom brackets for the Aquaram and ArenaVision fixutures mounted one and half meters from the face of the building and allowing for a 6º tilt. They also had to custom manufacture the braces for the LED tubes on the flagpole to allow visibility from all angles.
The whole lighting system, including the Aquaram color sequence, was pre-programmed on computers and loaded onto five LanBox-LCE mini DMX controllers, which are integrated with the master building management system for the bank building. The bank’s BMS now operates everything from the lighting to the air conditioning and elevators.
More:
» www.wybron.com
This case study is taken from Camilla Edwards’ report on the architectural lighting sector, which appears in the October issue of ‘Installation Europe’
