Lighting in Design November-December 2015

Tsim ShaTsui waterfront. Image courtesy: Wikipedia.

What better way for cities as diverse as Ahmedabad in India, Lima in Peru, or Shang- hai in China to draw attention away from their grimy, grid-locked streets and cheaply- constructed buildings, than to flood the night sky with music and symphonic light? There are two contexts for designers: integrating façade lighting into a new build, or – with more difficulty – figuring out how to add such lighting to existing buildings. Ahmedabad, one of India’s largest cities – and as I remember it back in 2000, a place that was so polluted it looked as if it had just been nuked – boasts the biggest media façade in In- dia. Ahmedabad is, without any sense of irony, billing itself as the ‘Manchester of the East’.The Mondeal project is an example of the former, where façade lighting has been integrated into the initial construction of the twin tower of ten and twelve storey office buildings connected via a two-storey retail complex. The façade features 3 968 LED lines covering 5 293m 2 . Atelier data, the lighting designers, worked with AHL, an LEDmanufacturer, to cre- ate the custom LED strips.The five-hour shows run eachwork-week evening, and are integrated into the sun-shades so that people working inside the office are not affected by the lighting. In Peru, Banco del Crédito de Peru (BCP), the country's largest and oldest bank, worked with lighting designers Claudia Paz and Nicho- las Cheung. It created an interactive public art installation on the outside of its existing headquarters with Philips Colour Kinetics lighting panels. The installation, BCP Affinity, consists of the main LED canvas, as well as a series of interactive LED podiums with multi-touch sen- sors, along with an interactive lighting control system. Spectators become participants in the artwork by using the panels to influence the interactive shows.

Mondeal Square in Ahmedabad, India. Image courtesy: Blocher Blocher.

Banco del Crédito de Peru (BCP). Image courtesy cosapi.com

LiD 11-12/15

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