The headquarters of the Swiss property company SPG in Geneva underwent renovation and got a new second skin of light and vertical offset glass fins. The building has been installed with specially developed ERCO LED facade luminaires.
The glass shell along with the newly installed lighting on the structure renders it a unique and magnificent look in the night. Basically, ERCO individual is a project-specific product solution for an extremely unusual glass façade
To highlight the one-of-a-kind effect of the facade at night (the project’s lighting designer Simon Simos called it the nocturnal signature of the building). The lighting designers and architects worked hand-in-hand from the starting of the project.
ERCO, as a partner in the area of LED lighting tools for sophisticated architecture, was hired during the early design phase of the building. The ERCO’s lighting engineers created inventive custom outdoor luminaires for the new glass facade of the SPG headquarters.
The light effect and the interplay of the facade luminaires with the printed glass fins were tested on-site using a model with a size of several metres. Around 290 LED facade luminaires were installed on three levels within the facade that covers eight floors.
The luminaires are concealed from the view. They are mounted in the gap between the glass fins with a width of only 45mm in some places. The reason: “Only the light effect, not the luminaires, should be visible to the observers,” explained Simon Simos. The possibility of miniaturization was exploited to its fullest only because of the LED technology when designing the lighting tools.
The lighting company, ERCO also supplied two variants of a high lumen-output and extremely narrow outdoor luminaire with a milled aluminium housing and IP 67 protection. Based on a catalogue product, variants with lengths of both 20cm and 30cm were developed with six or nine LEDs configured in series.
These two variants correspond to the dimensions of the glass fins that vary in terms of depth, height and intermediate spacing. The housing colour of the luminaires was also modified to match the silver-anodised fixing brackets of the fins.
