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County Hall

London, England

Situated on the South Bank adjacent to the London Eye, County Hall was once the headquarters for local government in London, England. Its main six-story building now houses tourist attractions, business, and hotels within its grand architectural space.

Inspired by the appealing LED lighting design of its famous neighbor, County Hall’s property management company, Metropolitan Estates, wanted to bring new life to the building’s exterior through the use of dynamic, colorful lighting. In association with Architainment Lighting Ltd, a leading distributor and specifier of LED lighting solutions in the UK, Metropolitan Estates chose ColorReach Powercore LED floodlights from Philips Color Kinetics to illuminate its impressive Edwardian façade to stunning effect.

With light output of over 5,000 lumens and light projection of up to 500 ft (152 m), ColorReach Powercore floodlights intensely illuminate the County Hall’s façade to its full height with uniform, color changing light , ensuring that the building is as much of an iconic and attractive landmark on the South Bank by night as it is by day.

As digitally controllable light sources, ColorReach Powercore floodlights can project dynamic light shows and color-changing lighting effects at the push of a button, eliminating the need for maintenance-intensive and light-blocking colored gels and filters. Their flexibility and high level of control allow corporate clients who hire County Hall for private events to easily and quickly brand the building and its surroundings with company colors or other distinctive themes.

Peter Castelton, director of Metropolitan Estates, explains the choice of ColorReach Powercore floodlights for the County Hall application: “Having seen what Philips ColorReach Powercore was capable of at the initial trial, we were completely convinced that this was the right solution for us...[I]t provides saturated color output at significantly less cost for installation, operation and maintenance than traditional light sources — and in today’s current economic climate these cost elements simply cannot be ignored.”

Installation involved a simple replacement of existing conventional fixtures with a total of 20 ColorReach Powercore fixtures. Sixteen fixtures were positioned at intervals between the columns to enhance the broad sweep of the crescent-shaped entrance, while four fixtures were spaced alongside the façade. Each ColorReach Powercore unit consumes just 290 watts at full intensity, compared with 600 watts for the conventional fixtures that they replaced, reducing energy usage for the application by about half.

Lighting effects and shows for the installation are stored on and triggered by an iPlayer 3 lighting controller from Philips Color Kinetics. Effects and shows are created using ColorPlay 3, the light show authoring software component of iPlayer 3.