The Temple of Divine Providence in Warsaw, Poland has been fitted with Robe Actor 6 and PARFect 100 LED fixtures as part of its architectural lighting install.
The Temple, which is one of the most significant Roman Catholic buildings in the country, is in the final throes of construction bringing to fruition an idea that was first inspired in 1791, shortly after the adoption of Poland’s first constitution.
The building project got properly underway in the Wilanów district in the south of the Polish capital in 2002, designed by architects Wojciech and Lech Szymborski.
Its spacious interiors – based on an 84sqm base with four entrances – and 60m-high reinforced concrete columns that form the nave, culminate in a rotunda gallery and a central glass dome at the top, all making high visual impact and defining the space. The pale coloured render of the columns and other interior features is perfect for lighting, so the Temple’s management company, The Centre of Divine Providence, reached out to lighting specialists Prolight Sp. z o.o. to design and specify a scheme that would transform the interior into a dynamic, space.
In addition to being an important place of worship and a national religious symbol, cutting edge acoustic treatment makes the 3,000 capacity Temple ideal for concerts, choral and orchestral recitals and televised music events. It also contains a museum dedicated to Pope John Paul II and Stefan Wyszyński leader of the Catholic Church under Communist rule and a Pantheon of Great Poles.
Prolight’s Tomasz Adamski created the lighting design, which includes a substantial quality of DMX controlled LED fixtures, and his colleagues Michal Kaczmarek and Rafal Rzeczkowski helped co-ordinate the installation process and the team.
The 16 Actor 6s, a static version of Robe’s LEDWash 600, are installed on special outrigging brackets so they can illuminate a circular rotunda at the lower apex of the dome. The Actor 6s are placed in a position that is not easily accessible, therefore fixtures were sought that were virtually guaranteed to keep going and require minimal maintenance.
Above these, the 80 PARfects are installed at the base of the curved dome walls, which stretch upwards for 60m to the top of the glass dome, complete with alternating variable height windows. For lighting this they needed fixtures with great colours and plenty of intensity allowing different areas of the dome to be delineated, picking out the detail of the overall design.
One of the primary challenges of the install was the work that had to be done at height, and there were also restrictions on touching most parts of the walls with any sort of hardware.
A series of LED colour changers were also installed at the base of the 26 arched columns as part of the scheme, so different surfaces in the Temple can be illuminated, bringing the environment alive.
An inaugural Mass was attended by Poland’s Prime Minister Beata Szydlo and President Andrzej Duda 224 years after the first cornerstone of the current Temple building was laid, also surviving a Russian invasion and two World Wars.
