Elation Professional’s Mexican partner, ADIMSA, has supplied Elation LED lighting fixtures to Inbursa Aquarium (Acuario Inbursa) in Mexico City. The company worked in conjunction with lighting designer Cynthia Ortiz to fulfill product specification, on-site supervision, and lighting fixture programming duties for the world-class facility.
Owned by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, Inbursa features 230 species of sea life across 11,500 sqft of space and is one of the largest aquariums in the world. Officially opened in June of this year, the building consists of four levels – the beach and manta ray area, the rainforest, basement 3 and Penguinarium – all but one of which is underground.
Ortiz specified Elation LED fixtures for the Aquarium’s multiple spaces, supervised the installation, including the final arrangement and positioning of the lighting fixtures, and programmed the lighting looks using Elation’s PC-based Compu Show lighting software.
“The flexibility to create scenes and the friendly interface of the software allowed us to conceptualize the spaces and atmospheres and get the best out of the lighting fixtures,” commented Ortiz.
The Elation lighting package includes RGBW Arena Par lights used in the Beach (La Playita) and manta ray area (outside the manta ray pool).
“Both areas required RGBW but are used in very different ways,” Ortiz added. “For the Beach, we wanted a uniform light, with bright walls and scene illuminations from noon to sunset. Another thing to consider in this area was the species of marine animal. There could not be red tones in the lighting so the sunset scene ended up being very subtle. At the manta ray area (a darker area) we wanted to highlight the texture of the floor and since this is a big open area the Arena Par was the best solution to achieve that.”
Installed in the Rainforest are a complement of Elation ELED Fresnel 150W LED lights used by Ortiz for their photometry and functionality. “We sought to create a ‘real’ atmosphere with light passing right through the trees and vegetation and the ELED Fresnel are ideal for this,” she says. More ELED Fresnels are used in the manta ray pool.
In basement 3, the lowest and darkest floor, IP-67 rated 3W Elation ELAR 2A04B recessed fixtures colour the space in blue light. “This fixture was installed as a signal light for a stair on the route so that visitors could see it,” Ortiz explains. “The color blue was chosen because we are on the bottom of the sea and most of the light for this floor is in these tones except from some accents to give the space more life.”
Used to project coloured light and highlight the texture of the rocks in the Penguinarium are Elation EPAR TRI LED Par Can. Behind the panguin’s pond Ortiz used ADJ Mega Bar 60 to create Artic (Aurora Borealis) effect, all in blue.
