Dexia building
Brussels, Belgium - 2006
The lighting project created by Space Cannon for the Brussels headquarters of the Dexia Group is now reality: an extraordinary scenic effect with a breathtaking visual impact. Space Cannon beat off the competition with its ability to offer cutting-edge technologies and innovative solutions. It is the largest system every built, controlled by DMX cables, with 25 km of cables running through the building from the second to the thirty-ninth floor.
This is the first installation in the world which sees the faà§ades of a building as maxi screens. Every window has been lit with an Ath-Luxor LED bar for a total of some 4200 luminaires and, when seen as the pixel of a monitor, means a monitor of thirty-nine floors. Every channel is independent from the others, and its operation and colour changes are individually controlled. It had been hitherto unimaginable to control so many DMX signals in parallel and was only made possible by a specifically designed system of connections with DMX and Ethernet cables and designing software, installed in a powerful host computer, capable of controlling every floor separately and of managing all the shows.
Running off from the host computer, the brain of the system installed on the ninth floor, are the Ethernet cables which carry the signal to the various floors. At every two floors, a device transforms the Ethernet signal into a DMX signal for each floor. The splitters recessed in the floor carry the DMX signal to the channels. This futuristic concept of lighting management opens up the way to a new era. The use of lighting designed in this way allows reproduction on the faà§ades of the building of multicoloured images and videos too, resulting in an irresistible appeal to anyone who can admire from close up and also from considerable distances this lighting show.
In addition to 4200 Ath-Luxor custom LED bars, in RGB with three channels, for the windows, two 4000W Titan spotlights were used with 22 custom blue light spotlights, with forty 3W LEDs, for the columns and 60 custom Ath-Luxor luminaires of various lengths in order to trace the perimeter and illuminate the security entrance at the main admission point.
Lighting designer: Barbara Hediger.
