Night lighting is a crucial part of the structure. Without lighting the structure becomes unusable for half of the day. We have been studying our lighting for some time now. Some of the questions I have had to face with lighting, is how much is too much? Is it more important to light the base and softly send light to the top? How do you mount the lights, and how to you change them if a light goes out? How do we make the pilaster’s have a subtle glow, compared to a giant beacon of light? What color temperature of lights do we need?
Last night a lot of these questions were answered and our lighting was finalized. We have decided to vary our locations of lights with in the pilasters. Some lights will face downward from the top and the others will face upwards from the bottom. This allows for the lighting to cover the whole structure but not to dominate one particular area. By lighting the top down on some pilasters, the visibility from the road increases tremendously. The interesting thing about this top and bottom system is it creates and interesting darker spot in the middle of the structure, which works perfectly to contrast the blue LED signs throughout the wall. If the lights were set up any other way we would not have this contrast, and the visibility of our signs would diminish slightly. We also addressed our mounting system for these lights. Of our multiple ideas the best was to mount a spotlight with a flat bracket to the steel crosspieces. With this bracket system the lights will all be uniform and the amount of drilling needed in the crosspieces will be minimal.
Our next step with lighting is to determine the power source, and how to get power from there to each one of our lights. And now I am off to do that early this morning, along with helping stake out our structure in Marion Square.