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La Rinascente Department Store

Milan, Italy

Fashion capital Milan is home to La Rinascente, Italy’s largest department store. Innovative and chic, La Rinascente is known for its stylish clothing and accessories and also its former employees, such as window dresser turned world-renowned designer, Giorgio Armani. Its theme “Shopping Requires Inspiration” extends beyond apparel offerings, inspiring shoppers through its sophisticated interior design, dazzling window displays and newly transformed façade, enabled by Color Kinetics’ intelligent LED lighting.

Located next to Milan’s famous cathedral -- il Duomo in Milan Centre -- La Rinascente commissioned Cibic & Partners to create an innovative exterior lighting scheme as part of a renovation project. The design firm created dynamic walls of light using Color Kinetics iColor® Flex SL strands. These multi-purpose, flexible strands of light can be easily configured into grids and other unique shapes for direct-view displays. A total of 240 strands -- or 12,000 LED nodes -- were installed across two exterior walls of the building. The nodes are spaced in 12” (30.5 cm) increments, and each can be individually controlled to create intricately designed effects and patterns of light, including logos and images.

To diffuse and magnify the appearance of each node, Cibic & Partners mounted frosted glass panels over the entire installation. A series of light shows are authored and controlled by Light System Manager, which makes it simple to discover and address all 12,000 nodes in the network. It combines an intuitive graphical user interface for show authoring with a powerful, Ethernet-based hardware controller for show storage and playback.

The end result is a unique and entrancing façade, inspiring Milan residents and visitors alike.