Creating dramatic impact around the world with lighting from Signify

First destination takes us down under to Australia, as we start with a look at the ‘Orb', the Adelaide Entertainment Centre.

The Orb creates a spectacular experience for visitors. The domed entry has been completely transformed with a customised LED lighting installation engineered to deliver maximum visual impact.

Conceptualised by international lighting designer, Lighting Design Partnership (LDP), the Orb’s customised LED lighting installation has been engineered to deliver maximum visual impact, while also providing a wide variety of lighting scene choice and operational flexibility. 

To achieve the sophisticated lighting effects, each of the Orb’s 140 ETFE pillows has been fitted with six Color Kinetics ColorGraze Powercore linear colour-changing LED fixtures, with 30-degree or 60-degree beam-angle lensing. Over 800 LED lighting fixtures are deployed throughout the Orb, providing over 3500 individually controllable lighting addresses.

Read more on the Adelaide Entertainment Centre

Place de la Comédie is the main focus point of Montpellier with the Opera being center stage. The historic character of this public space, and the numerous architectural elements that surround it, make it a special place for people to meet and tourists to gather. It is accessible by streetcar with the railway station and shops close by.

The concept for the nighttime lighting design was the mission of Yann Kersalé, lighting designer and artist. The color blue was chosen as a metaphor for water, symbolic of the river Lez that runs through the city.  

The tall light columns that tower over the streetcar line are lit in blue and at the top are multiple lighting sources of white light that illuminate the public space.

These high mast columns are spaced out at regular intervals to help guide our sightline all the way to the façade of the opera house. The window mouldings of the edifice are lit in blue while white light accentuates the horizontal lines for a dramatic look.

With its unmistakable signature shell, the Hollywood Bowl is one of world's largest natural amphitheaters, and a famed American landmark. It is home to the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, the summer home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the host venue for hundreds of musical events each year.

The Hollywood Bowl had a lighting makeover with the help of Color Kinetics LED lighting solution. The team was led by lighting designer Jay Winters of JK Design Group, and Paul Geller, Los Angeles Philharmonic Director of Production. Their goal was to seamlessly illuminate the entire arch of the shell with concealed, color-changing fixtures. Previously, color-changing effects were achieved using conventional light sources with scrolling color changers or dichroic color-mixing fixtures.

When considering a new shell lighting system, the team compared several technologies and determined that an LED-based approach was the way to go. According to Winters, "The move to Color Kinetics' LED-based system allowed not only the ability for straight color changes, but also an unlimited variety of sequenced effects and an amazing range of effects in terms of how we moved from one color to another."

The team chose iColor Cove MX Powercore high-output linear LED luminaires, and mounted them in custom, 1.2 m (4 ft) long sheet metal channels. The metal channels provided the proper cut-off to control the luminaires' wide beam dispersion, ensuring the effective illumination of each surface of the shell's concentric baffles with no light spilling onto the other surfaces of the stage area. The luminaires were compatible with the Hollywood Bowl's existing theatrical DMX console, which made the switch to the new system seamless.

Read more about the Hollywood Bowl installation