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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.
Tsim ShaTsui waterfront. Image courtesy: Wikipedia.
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LiD
11-12/15
Mondeal Square in Ahmedabad, India.
Image courtesy: Blocher Blocher.
Banco del Crédito de Peru (BCP).
Image courtesy
cosapi.com