The wall is adorned with 2ft and 3ft square openings running the entire circumference, giving the building a Spanish Mission look. This architectural parapet detail is accentuated with LED lights from Acclaim Lighting, which are mounted inside the wall and fill each square with a palette of slowly-changing colours.
MOLAA's colour-changing parapet is the artistry of Richard Rutherford. Asked by the museum to come up with a cost-efficient, easy-to-run solution for lighting the new façade, Rutherford chose Acclaim X-Bar LEDs.
A DMX-controllable RGB-colour-mixing LED tube, the X-Bar comes in four different lengths and is rated at IP 67 for outdoor use. Rutherford installed 125 X-Bar 500s (500mm) to light the 2ft squares. The larger 3ft openings are located over the building's front sign and are illuminated with X-Bar 875s (875 mm).
"The X-Bar was perfect for the job," said Rutherford. "They were simple to install and programme. We installed the IP rated UL power supplies and DMX data distributors in NEMA enclosures, and the system was fairly plug and play from there."
The programming could have been far more complex, because the X-Bars are "capable of doing a lot more than we were asking them to," added Rutherford. However, given the scale of the building exterior, Rutherford elected to go with simple colour fill-ups and chases that are more discernible at long distances.
(Jim Evans)
