Designers intentionally expose façade lighting to add texture and detail to the exterior of a new hotel building that towers over the other structures in the area.
iLight Technologies has announced a hotel LED lighting project on the waterfront in Portland, Maine in which Plexineon LED luminaires add sparkle to the façade at night and texture to the building during the day. The architects and designers made the decision to expose rather than hide the fixtures to add contrast and texture with the seven-story building standing much taller than the other nearby structures.
The new Hyatt Place hotel in Portland occupies a prominent spot in the tourist-centric Old Port district and stands in contrast to the low-rise brick buildings that surround it. The architectural design was intended to spotlight the growing sophistication of the seaside city and raise its profile as a tourist destination. Still, architects at Canal 5 Studio and lighting designers at Greg Day Lighting sought to accentuate the precision and rectilinear shape of the building with the LED lighting.
The team working on the building decided to install linear Plexineon 2X fixtures surrounding the penthouse level of the building and cascading down one exterior wall. The 2800K-CCT luminaires deliver soft light but with a distinctive asymmetric pattern that will make the building standout day and night.
"The Plexineon becomes like sparkly jewels to contrast with the masculinity of the building," said lighting designer Greg Day. "It’s part of a very Fred and Ginger dance: There’s the curve of the hotel with freeforming glass and the flat, ordered panels."
The concept was specifically intended to use the LED lighting fixtures as an accessory to the architecture. "We could have hidden them between the gaps in the compressed stone siding, but we made a conscious decision to make them visible by day," said Day. Architect Patrick Costin added, "The iLight [luminaires] permitted us to add texture and detail to the façade during the day and a distinctive identity to the building at night."
The Plexineon fixtures themself have an interesting story. iLight had sought to develop an LED fixture that avoided the complexity of color LED fixtures that use red, green, and blue (RGB) LEDs and that eliminated the color uniformity issues associated with some white lighting that is based on phosphor-converted LEDs.
The Plexineon White 2X products utilize blue LEDs combined with remote-phosphor diffusers that deliver uniform light. Moreover, because the LEDs, and the heat from the semiconductor junction, are separated from the phosphor in the diffuser, the color will not shift over time. The design delivers double the light output of the older Plexineon 1X family while still providing long life and uniformity.
