Built in 1894 in the ornate second empire style from white marble and limestone, Philadelphia's City Hall is a striking landmark in the middle of the city. The building features a 548-foot clocktower with a statue of the city's founder, William Penn, and, until 1986, was the tallest structure in the city.
This year, the lighting on the façade was upgraded to make it easier to implement different lighting styles for holidays and events and keep the night-time looks fresh. Programmer and integration technician Lucas Nguyen and senior project manager Andrew Thompson from Starlite, of nearby Moorestown, NJ, worked with lighting designers The Lighting Practice, to install the Electronic Theatre Controls Mosaic Control System and City Theatrical, LLC Multiverse® Wireless DMX system. Senior Project Manager, Andrew Thompson talked to Live Design about the project.
Live Design: What attracted Starlite to this project in particular?
Andrew Thompson: Starlite has a strong history of successful projects integrating and programming exterior lighting systems including the Trenton Makes Bridge near Trenton, NJ and the Corn Trust Building in Old City Philadelphia. We were excited by the opportunity to work on another iconic piece of architectural in the region.
LD: What was the scope of your work on this project?
AT: Starlite provided the lighting control and data distribution equipment, as well as startup and programming services. As always, we worked in tight collaboration with our project partners and the design team to understand the vision for the project so that we could support an efficient installation. This tight coordination also allowed Starlite to suggest solutions to emergent challenges that supported the artistic vision while being cognizant of what could be achieved within the physical and technical characteristics of the project environment.
LD: What prompted the upgrade in gear and technology?
AT: The previous lighting was conventional fixtures, which required regular access to change lamps on any of ten buildings surrounding City Hall. In recent years as more facades throughout the city feature color-changing LED elements and seasonal events add projection mapping elements to the City Hall façade, the interest in improving the lighting of this important landmark, as well as adding color-changing capacity brings this historic building up to par with its neighbors.
The new lighting is controlled by an ETC Mosaic show controller, and those control signals are distributed to the remote buildings by a combination of Pathway Connectivity devices and City Theatrical Multiverse wireless DMX products. The new lighting fixtures are the ReachElite by Color Kinetics. Remote access for programming, testing and monitoring is facilitated by Village Controls equipment.
LD: What challenges present were presented by having lighting positions on adjacent building ?
AT: The lighting fixtures are installed on ten separate buildings surrounding City Hall. Some of these buildings are owned and operated by the City, but most are privately held. Our project partners did an exceptional job of arranging access protocols to allow our technicians to get up to the various rooftops as needed, but utilizing the wireless and remote capabilities of the system was critical to the project’s success.
LD: What was the most challenging part of the project?
AT: Even on a project with fewer parties involved, aligning resources to complete work in the ever shifting timeline of construction projects can be very challenging. Starlite was able to maintain a common understanding of progress and procedure so that we had multiple options in terms of technicians available to move the project forward in sequence with other parties on the project.
LD: What difficulties were imposed by the location?
AT: Philadelphia City Hall is uniquely situated in the center of the city, which is why the district is known as Center City and infrequently referred to as “downtown”. The main subway transit lines intersect directly below City Hall and major hubs for light rail and bus services are located within blocks. This meant that in order to avoid spoiling the surprise of the new lighting for most residents the programming sessions were scheduled to start late in the night and go until early in the morning.
The location also presented some challenges with signal transmission in some locations where the receiving or transmitting wireless DMX antenna was directly in the line of massive cellular service antenna arrays. Despite operating in totally different frequency ranges, which were generating enough RF energy that a signal lock could not be established between the Multiverse transmitter and receiver.
In these cases, we were able to relocate the transmitter from the roof of City Hall to an adjacent remote building with a secure connection and daisy-chain the signal from remote building to remote building, maintaining the link without interference from the cellular arrays.
