Architectural Lighting Design - Barclays, New York, New York, USA

Barclays has been in business for over 300 years, but when they wanted to rebrand their Americas headquarters in the heart of Times Square in New York City, they turned to the most cutting-edge technology in lighting—LEDs.

The objective for the Barclays branding project was to create a "lantern" effect on the Manhattan nighttime skyline using Barclays corporate blue color. The design also called for incorporating the Brclays name in channel lettering and the Barclays eagle logo on all four sides of the building. During the day, the lantern walls remain white. At dusk, they begin to slowly transition to Barclays corporate blue. Simultaneously, the channel letters transition from blue to white.

For the design and implementation, Barclays chose Herring Media Group (HMG) for their expertise in Architectural Media, a term HMG has trademarked to escribe their proprietary design approach for the display of integrated lighting and digital imaging on buildings and built environments. Architectural Mediacombines large-scale digital imaging with dramatic illumination to transform built environments into immersive theaters of light and image that identify, inform, and entertain the public.

A fifty-ton steel structure was built and integrated into the existing architecture to support the mounting of the LED fixtures. The structure was covered with over 60,000 square feet of white diffuser film to create curtain walls which serve as a projection scrim for the color-changing lighting effect.

To uniformly saturate the scrim with Barclays blue, Philips Color Kinetics ColorReach Powercore and ColorGraze Powercore LED fixtures with custom lenses were installed opposite each interior curtain wall. Additional ColorGraze Powercore fixtures were positioned on catwalks above the curtain walls, and additional ColorReach Powercore fixtures were installed on vertical I-beams against the Alucobond walls surrounding the building's HVAC cooling tower. These fixtures were aimed back toward the curtain walls to maximize the lighting efficiency. ColorReach Powercore fixtures feature an innovative split design that allowed the installation of two different custom spread lenses to achieve a perfect beam spread across the top of the building. Altogether, the installation uses 184 ColorReach Powercore fixtures and over 1,000 linear feet of ColorGraze Powercore fixtures.

Marc Herring of HMG chose Philips Color Kinetics LED lighting solutions to make the Barclays building stand out from the metal halide and LED video screen installations prevalent in Times Square. Said Herring, "I am confident in the efficiencies, quality and certainty of Philips Color Kinetics products for my applications. The ColorReach Powercore and ColorGraze Powercore fixture combination provided the uniform coverage, intensity and control variables that we required for this installation."

Barclays is pleased with their new lighting system, and with the fact that it supports corporate sustainability goals. According to a company statement, "Barclays was committed to sustainability with a key focus on energy efficiency principles. This concentration allowed the team to achieve an innovative design that consumes approximately 85% less energy than comparable metal halide lighting."