Lighting in Design November December 2017

Looking behind the scenes From design to manufacturing to installation, Giantlight has been at the forefront of lighting, and more specifically solid state lighting, in South Africa for many years. Much of the company’s recent work has been at Menlyn Maine’s Sun International Times Square Casino and the Times Square Sun Arena and, with both these projects now completed, Lighting in Design spoke to Wolfgang Horlacher about the work the company undertook in these two venues.

H orlacher describes the lighting of South Af- rica’s second largest casino as a “mammoth task”. It occupies an entire city block in the Menlyn Maine precinct in Pretoria, and is situated directly opposite the Sun Arena and alongside the soon to be completed MaslowTime Square hotel. The key design features of the casino gaming floor, by Gabriël Hugo of LYT Architecture, were the ‘spider web’ of colour changing pendants above both gaming floors (see Lighting in Design 06/17 ) and the infinity mirrors. “The spider web,” says Horlacher, “consisted of nearly two kilometres of colour changing light fittings suspended five metres above the ground. It was designed to respond to various triggers, from cues in an advertisement played on the public address system to the bonanza that comes with a jackpot being won”.

It was a complex installation: each of the lengths of the colour changing fittings came with its own five-core cable, which ran up to 100 m to the various control rooms around the gaming floors. It was a “cabling nightmare” that required hours of labour. That done, the next task was to synchronise the 395 individual pieces that made up the ‘web’. Digital Multiplex (DMX) was used to control the fixtures and enabled the users to synchronise the lighting over the two floors. Horlacher explains that while colour-changing lights were a familiar concept for Giantlight, the infinity mirrors certainly were not. “We had to create optical illusions by using two different types of mirror, one that allowed passers-by to see through, and a standard mirror on the other side. This resulted in whatever was between the

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LiD NOV/DEC 2017