PROJECT:

61 Oxford Street, London

Powercor’s installation of light art installation in an undulating three-storey glass lantern wins RIBA Award

61 Oxford Street is a striking new building in London’s prime shopping area sited on the corner of Oxford Street and Soho Street. Designed for Dukelease Properties and British Airways Pension Fund by AHMM Architects, the six-storey scheme comprises 35,000 sq. ft. of prime retail space occupied by Zara, two floors of Grade A offices, and six high-quality residential apartments. The building’s signature is the use of rippling glass facades and references to the oriel or bay style shop front windows that were popular with London’s retailers in the late 19th century.

At a glance

Dynamic Lighting
LED Lighting & Controls
Electrical Services

OUR APPROACH AND IMPACT

Powercor were contracted by Studio Fractal who are award-winning architectural lighting designers to install 3 tiers of 2,759 individually controlled LEDs that would be programmed with subtle changes in colour, pattern, speed and brightness to provide a sinuous flow of illumination between levels and attracting attention with its hypnotic colour variations.

The Lantern was inspired by the green spaces of London and the graceful installation mimics the glazing frit pattern through a series of active colour changing ranges and has content developed so that it can highlight seasonal changes and celebratory annual events like the beginning of autumn and even Valentines Day.

Powercor manufactured and installed all the aluminium struts and bracketry which housed forty-five custom length strands ranging from 26 nodes to 71 nodes of Philips Color Kinetics iColor Flex MX gen2, a multi-purpose, high-intensity strand of full-color LED nodes for generating extraordinary lighting effects, including patterns and video that we then installed.

Once the installation was completed, Studio Fractal worked with Architainment to install a Pharos LPC 20 controller and 3 Philips Color Kinetics sPDS-480ca units in an IP rated and cooled equipment rack to manage the content for the strands and commission the final solution into operation.