A.C. Special Projects adds life to County Hall
- Details
The historic County Hall location is etc.venues' largest event space of 15 sites around the Capital, and a major historic tourist destination.
The lighting team at Hoare Lea worked closely with lead interior designer, Jestico + Whiles and executive architect, Synergy Architects, restoring County Hall to create a unique conference space for etc.venues.
The project included upgrading the building with integrated lighting elements to reveal and accentuate its architectural history, and help to create spaces with flexible ambient lighting serving and enhancing different events and tasks, ranging from large conferences to small group brainstorming sessions.
Spread over two floors, the etc.venues County Hall features a reception, conference and meeting rooms, a snug bar and restaurant wings. Many of the 30 rooms can be used individually, or combined with adjacent spaces to create a range of different sizes and configurations. As well as 12 flexible conference and meeting areas, there a number of suites with a capacity of up to 400 which can combined into multi-purpose spaces for up to 900 guests. The venue also offers smaller meeting and training rooms, as well as exclusive-use spaces.
When it came to the provision of a highly flexible and user-friendly new lighting control solution to cater for the re-configurable, multi-use event spaces, Hoare Lea were keen to utilise the state of the art e:cue control and automation system. They approached A.C. Special Projects, an experienced e:cue specialist and ‘certified partner’ with a track record of providing their systems for various large-scale architectural projects, to provide a bespoke e:cue solution.
AC-SP Project Manager, Chris Little attended numerous site meetings with Hoare Lea, the venue and the electrical contractor, to discuss the site's bespoke control requirements. He then designed the end-to-end e:cue system, programmed and commissioned it to deliver the dynamic lighting design.
Various DALI fittings throughout the venue are controlled on each floor by an e:cue ETH2DALI. e:cue Butler XT2s are used to relay information from partition switches to the e:cue system and control DMX lighting in the re-configurable suites, so it can be adjusted according to the actual room configuration.
As well as overseeing the project's lighting control system and liaising with Hoare Lea, the venue and the electrical contractor, AC-SP produced in-depth DALI Bus Layout, DMX and wiring diagrams, and supplied the e:cue system control racks pre-built and wired to connect on-site with the diagrams, to assist the contractor with the installation.
etc.venues County Hall's head of design, Franck Rosello commented: "We like to add value to our clients by offering them built-in advanced features such as dimmable and colour changing lighting that can be the backdrop to a brand - turning any event into a memorable experience. A.C. Special Projects delivered the perfect technical solution to meet ours and Hoare Lea's particular requirements.”
(Jim Evans)
