When you look at buildings in your city’s downtown, are they just plain skyscrapers with little architectural design, or are they modern works of art? Many buildings throughout the world have just the basics when it comes to exterior lighting. But what if there was a solution that not only saved money for building owners and helped the environment, but also brought the building alive with color?  Through the use of energy-efficient LED lighting, reinventing a city skyline with almost limitless color possibilities, is a reality today.

In most cities there seems to be one building that stands out in the concrete jungle. The building design tends to separate it from the rest and most times, it is lit at night with some architectural lighting to enhance or highlight certain areas. Many times it is just in white and in some cases, a handful of colors are used through the use of colored gels. While the use of lighting on a building exterior adds a nice touch, it does come at a significant cost to building owners and conventional lighting systems are manually intensive.

To light a building, there are several different traditional fixtures that have been used in the past. This consisted many of 400-watt or 1000-watt metal halide fixtures and if color was required, maintenance crews added lens or gels. While these fixtures were the best solution in their day, times have changed and LED lighting has made a dramatic entrance.

For the city of Miami, the Miami Tower has been an icon since opening back in February 1987. The colorful lights illuminating the exterior of the building has made it a landmark for the city. In recent years, the aging lighting system, which consisted of 382 metal halide fixtures, had become highly inefficient and required constant maintenance to change lamps, ballasts and even the colored gels. To find a solution to their lighting problem, Miami Tower called upon the LED lighting experts at LED Source®. State-of-the-art LED lighting fixtures were chosen from Philips Color Kinetics that provided the versatility of color changing while reducing energy costs.

To update the metal halide fixtures, 216 ColorReach Powercore and the ColorGraze Powercore LED lights were used. These fixtures are able to produce 16 million colors and offer hundreds of lighting effects. The new LED lighting system not only reduced lighting related energy consumption by 92%, it also allows the Tower to change colors at the touch of a button without any additional maintenance expense. The building owner will save nearly $260,000 annually and 1.2 million pounds of CO2 emissions.

What does it take today to create an icon for city skylines? Look no further than architectural LED lighting to add color to your building.

For more information on the Miami Tower LED lighting upgrade project, please contact LED Source.

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