Located within the Yas Marina Circuit, Abu Dhabi, the Yas Hotel's opening on 1 November 2009 coincided with the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, and it is the first hotel in the world to be built over a Formula 1 race circuit.
Designed by architects Asymptote Architecture of New York, the hotel's exterior surface forms a 217m aerodynamic sweep composed of over the 5,389 pivoting diamond-shaped colour changing LED panes. Conceived as an environmentally responsive skin that by day reflects the sky and surroundings and by night is lit by a nearly 5000 RGBW LED fixtures from ENFIS/Cooper Lighting, the Grid Shell is one of the world's largest LED projects to date.
ARUP Lighting, New York designed the lighting for the structure with a sophisticated RDM lighting control system created by e:cue lighting control, Germany.
The installation boasts 20,000 channels of RDM and runs smooth colour-changing sequences and low resolution video content across the roof. Effects range from the subtle and undulating to the dramatic and spectacular, at one point even emulating a chequered flag as Sebastian Vettel, winner of the first Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, crossed the finish line.
E:cue lighting control, as the main contractor, approached Artistic Licence to create a specialised piece of equipment to help facilitate their ambitious control plans.
"We needed an RJ45 1U DMX/RDM compliant splitter for the YAS Hotel LED control," says e:cue lighting control's Gregor Bauer, "so we approached Artistic Licence - who already had a 5pin version - to see if an RJ45 version could be built specifically for this project. Simon Hobday, Artistic Licence managing director, agreed to produce a limited run for our purposes in distributing data across this prestigious project."
The new Rack-Split RDM RJ45 has proved such a success that Artistic Licence has since adopted it into its extensive DMX Splitter portfolio for the benefit of its wider customer base.
(Jim Evans)
