Designed to deliver vibrancy and flexibility to survive marine environment offering a visual treat to visitors and enhanced tourism.
Viaduct Harbour: Vibrant cityscape. Engaged visitors.
Viaduct Harbour,
Downtown Auckland, NZ
Bright Nights will enhance Viaduct Harbour’s iconic status as one of Auckland’s most desirable locations, where the waterfront meets the best of hospitality and light art.
Customer challenge
Viaduct Harbour is a heavily obstructed area by cables, gangways and other infrastructure. Philips lighting was tasked to adapt to local celebrations and events, allowing programming from anywhere with regular content updates. The Philips luminaires also had to survive sea air, salt spray and even partial immersion, and still have a satisfactory light output in ten years’ time.
The right lighting
For the western wall, Philips iColor Flex LMX Gen2, a direct view system, was mounted on stainless steel plates and overlaid with a customised diffusing screen resulting in seamless light movements.
For the southern wall, the luminaire chosen was the Philips ColorGraze MX4 Powercore from Color Kinetics, an IP66 fitting made of high-quality aluminium with a low copper content to withstand the marine location. To avoid the wall looking flat and featureless, the interior of each frame was washed with carefully-directed light that used a gradation in intensity across the surface to provide interest and contrast.
A waterproof secondary housing was designed and built locally from marine-grade 316 stainless steel with a glass lens, and the luminaire was mounted and sealed inside this.
Lighting designer Angus Muir was commissioned to design the creative content while the Philips ActiveSite gateway monitors the health of the system sending real-time fault alerts to address immediately.
