Façade Lighting Solutions For Building Structures

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Facade lightings are illuminations provided to structures to highlight their architectural features and create a picturesque effect. The lights enhance the individual building features and aesthetic beauty of the structure, provide safety, and help the building stand out. 

Illuminating the facades at night makes the structure appear more attractive. It shapes the image of the townscape, resulting in more footfalls, higher revenue, and enhanced prestige. 

This article briefs about the different facade lighting solutions used for various types of structures.

Facade Lighting Solutions

Facade lightings are provided to serve several purposes based on which it is divided into:

1. Architectural lighting Solutions
2. Emotional lighting solutions
3. Communicative lighting solutions

1. Architectural Lighting Solutions for Facade

Architectural lighting for facades emphasizes the architectural elements and ways to highlight them as decided by the architect and the building owner. This illumination concept does not change the character of the building.

For example, uniform and wide-area illumination of a facade reveals the natural shapes and surfaces of the building structure. Another option is to use white lights to pick out the individual columns, ornaments, or projections in the darkness. The light source chosen for architectural lighting is dependent on the materials and the color of the facade. 

Special attention is given to the entrances, columns, or individual parts of the building to enhance the symbolic value of the ornaments, especially for historic buildings.

2. Emotional Lighting Solutions For Facades

Architects or owners choose emotional lighting when they deliberately wish to give their structure a completely fresh night-time look. Emotional lighting chooses bold colors and creates light patterns to provide a new personality to the structure. This helps arouse attention and shape the townscape as illumination helps to create an emotional link between the architecture and the onlooker.

Emotional lighting solutions for facades transform a neutral architecture into an attractive facade. In addition, this illumination acts like a second skin for the structure at night, thus attracting long-distance travelers. 

Some of the design tools employed to provide emotional lighting to facades are:

1. Using reflective surfaces as projectors to display light patterns
2. Making building cast shadows on walls

3. Communicative Lighting Solutions For Facade

Communicative facade lightings are installed to convey information about a brand and grab attention. Commercial companies and local authorities use communicative lighting for marketing purposes. These lights give the corporate design of a brand a greater reach.

Media facades are used to convey specific information and help transform the townscape. This type of facade lighting consists of small lighting points or luminous fields controlled individually, enabling to play images, films, and text on a grid-shaped matrix. Media facades work in harmony with their setting and embrace the architecture and space surrounding them. 

Facade Lighting Management

The quality of luminaries and the right lighting control system influence the effectiveness of the facade lighting system. Hence, the lighting management system must work intelligently and sustainably.

Facade lighting consumes energy and tends to produce night-time brightness that seriously affects the environment and nature. Some of the effects are:

1. Alteration of growth in plants
2. Effect on biodiversity
3. Problems in astronomical observations 
4. Disruption to human sleep-wake rhythms

Hence, facade illumination is designed to consider the above environmental and safety aspects as the top priority. Some ideas for effective facade lighting system are:

1. LED luminaries consume less energy and can be installed directly on the surface that is to be illuminated. 
2. Directing the light in a targeted manner helps to minimize stray light and associated light pollution.
3. The use of intelligent lighting control systems help to provide the safe and required illumination with minimum energy consumption.

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