Painting With Light At Ghelamco Arena

Painting With Light recently completed an exterior architectural lighting scheme for the new Ghelamco Arena in Gent, Belgium.
Home to football team KAA Gent the new stadium was opened in a blaze of glory after Painting With Light was asked by Philips Lighting Solutions to create a complete scheme with bespoke control solution for specialist visuals.
The concept was chosen by the project’s Chief Developer Paul Gheysen, CEO of Ghelamco.
The PWL team was led by Luc Peumans.
"It was a fantastic project in which to be involved," he said.
"And I am very proud of the results achieved in this extremely short timescale. It was also a great collaboration between us and Philips who supported us through every stage."
The Media façade is built from approximately 9 kilometres (85000) of Philips CK iColor Flex LMX product – flexible strands of intense colour changing LED pixels 12 cm apart. These are placed in vertical lines with a vertical pitch of 12.5 centimetres apart all around the building. The horizontal pitch is 115 cm and the façade covers over 10.000 square metres in total.
Sixty-four Philips CK eW Graze Powercore LED strips are incorporated into the design.
The bespoke control system for these involves a Coolux Media Player Pro server running CK’s Video Systems Manager component and Coolux’s Media Manager Pro, with Coolux Widget Designer PRO triggering everything. This lighting is controlled from a grandMA2 on PC console running via KiNet protocol.
The setup will enable the arena to promote events or provide information to spectators, as images and text can be graphically displayed or appear on the exterior of the Arena. New content can be produced and programmed into the system at any time.
The exterior lighting elements feature over 500 Philips LED fixtures of various types including ColorBlasts and Graze Powercore.
The roof is outlined with another 140 x Philips Color Kinetics eW Graze Powercore LED strips which can change colour. The cantilevered overhanging sections around the roof are coloured using 232 x Philips CK ColorBlast PowerCore LED floods. At ground level, the gallery level section of the building shell is illuminated with another 220 x ColorBlast PowerCores.
All lighting fixtures have been pixel mapped to allow video content to be run through them as well as onto the Media Façade, allowing lighting to be matched to the current video content on display if desired.
At the front entrance, the lighting design is completed with eight panels on the outside, which are up-lit with 64 x ColorBlazes, plus eight advertising posts each with three Clay Paky Sharpies mounted in Igloo weather domes on the tops for creating piercing beam effects.
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(IT/CD)