Old Spitalfields Market.
During the last 14 years this major East London destination has secured its place at the forefront of art, interiors, fashion and food. The home of a thriving market for over three hundred years, the recent refurbishment has with thoughtful architectural design and technical consideration managed to fuse its historical features with a contemporary lighting scheme.
Architects Jestico & Whiles describe their lighting scheme as a 'digital canvas'. A number of interconnected lighting and display components are integrated into the fabric of the buildings in the market, all of which are centrally controlled and programmed.
Due to the complex incorporation of a large number of media and lighting fixtures a specialist company was required to blend the various elements and provide a turnkey solution.
Working alongside Fulcrum, the appointed M & E consultant, e-luminate were able to provide exactly that.
There were some tricky elements to both the installation, extreme cable runs under ground and work at height plus the control of some 35,000 DMX channels!
The majority of the complications were centred on the lift shaft, the largest and most eye-catching light feature of them all. Entirely cladding the exterior of the lift shaft in the market are 263 Traxon Mirror 64PXL wash panels chosen for their ability to blend into the architecture of the market, reflecting the many features in their smoked mirror diffusers even when inactive. When turned on, the lift shaft springs into life with the panels creating a four-sided low-resolution LED video screen that can display text, animations or ambient colour-changing effects.
Each 500mmsq panel has 64 RGB LED's in an 8 x 8 array that allow playback of moving text, animations or colour changing effects.
Due to the large volume of DMX channels required to drive this system, and the added complication of integration to DALI and mains switching controlled fixtures to name but a few... the choice for a total control solution was easy. e:cue have vast experience in this area and have worked on a large number of worldwide projects where the control system is critical for day to day operations.
So a scheme was developed with a central control rack being installed in the security room. This housed a media engine, and two control servers along with a pull out monitor, keyboard and mouse drawer.
The media engine forms the central interface to the feature lighting throughout the marketplace and one of the control servers talks to 66 butlers to control the Traxon panels on the lift shaft. The remaining control server provides backup to the media engine, and also acts as a correspondent to a logic server that is driving the main marketplace lighting by Holophane.
Due to the long cable runs and data traffic issues, various interface boxes are installed in numerous locations. Each of these house a DMX booster / splitter device, and where necessary DMX to DALI converters. There are also three Ethernet IO devices, which allow the daylight sensors to talk to the media engine. For all the non-dimmable feature lighting there are also 2 x 24-channel and 2 x 4-channel switching packs.
The system works automatically with daily triggers switching on feature lighting and allowing for daylight saving via the daylight sensors and logic from the e:cue software. There is of course just a simple manual override action pad layout for those moments when human intervention is required.
