September 25th, 2024

Dynamic architectural lighting not only illuminates buildings—it can strengthen a city’s identity, make public spaces more appealing, and increase tourism and revenue for local businesses. These motivations entered into the decision to redesign the lighting on the façade of Florence’s most important monument, the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella.

Firenze Smart, a public company that manages the city’s lighting and smart services, commissioned Signify with this historic task, based on our recognized leadership in connected urban lighting, with successful street and façade lighting installations in over a thousand cities around the world. The Santa Maria Novella project demonstrates how a system consisting of dynamic LED luminaires and connected lighting management software and controls can help bring a city's soul to life, stimulate civic pride, and bring different buildings and monuments together to create a coherent and compelling urban experience. 

The Firenze Smart technical office’s goal was to highlight and respect the Renaissance and medieval features that characterize Florence. At Santa Maria Novella, lighting designers focused on enhancing the white marble façade with light cooler than the 3000K used in the rest of the square and historic center, but not cooler than 4000K. For a pleasing contrast, they used warm light to illuminate the basilica’s iconic marble sun, inlaid in marble in the center of the tympanum, to emphasize the building's identity and importance.

Firenze Smart coordinated the work and carried out the installation, taking advantage of its deep knowledge of the area to identify the best locations for Signify's lighting fixtures on private buildings around the piazza. The new lighting system includes 12 Color Kinetics Reach Elite IntelliHue LED floodlights, chosen for their ability to produce millions of colors and shades of white light, and is managed and controlled using Interact connected lighting software for remote monitoring and management of the lighting scenarios.  The new dynamic architectural lighting system allows the exterior of the famous building to be further enhanced in the eyes of citizens and tourists, while ensuring greater energy efficiency.

With multiple channels of colored and white LEDs, the Color Kinetics fixtures can uniformly illuminate the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella’s façade with precisely the right shade of high-quality white light. During cultural events and national holidays, on the other hand, the city can bathe the basilica in multiple, constantly changing colors. 

To the Santa Maria Novella project, Firenze Smart applied the expertise it gained during the lighting redesign of Florence's historic city gates in 2018. For example, they engineered a system of lenses for the Color Kinetics fixtures that reliably distributed and directed the light, reducing the chances of incorrectly positioning the floodlights. Firenze Smart was also already familiar with Interact connected lighting from the city gates project. Using Interact has simplified scene management for the city’s lighting, allowing for easy coordination, updates, and modifications. 

With the new lighting system from Signify, this most important of local monuments can now join other important monuments that are illuminated during Green Line Firenze, a celebration of the communicative power of light held every Christmas. The result is an architectural masterpiece that is further enhanced in beauty and value. 

As Andrea Bernardini, commercial director for public systems and services at Signify Italy, has said, this project confirms Signify’s leading role as a provider of lighting systems capable of enhancing urban settings with dynamic architectural lighting, while at the same time promoting energy efficiency and the historical and artistic integrity of some of the most important buildings, monuments, and landmarks in the world.