In addition to three floors of office space, the ten-storey, 84,000sq.ft facility features a total of 14 rehearsal studios, two of which can be used as function rooms. Owned and operated by The New 42nd Street Inc, it was set up as an independent non-profit organisation to assume long-term responsibility for seven historic theatres on the block.
The facility recently tasked its lighting designer, Anne Militello, of Los Angeles-based Vortex Lighting, with the revitalisation of the building, replacing the conventionally-lit extravaganza she had designed at the start of the new millennium, with a LED solution using Coemar fixtures.
When the architectural firm Platt Byard Dovell originally conceived the New 42nd Street Studios, they provided a façade that would create abstract fields of changing colour, persuading New 42nd Street Inc to turn its back on the customary Times Square signage. The building combined plain and frosted glass with Venetian louvres.
In June 2000 this $33.7 million project opened, with Anne Militello creating a largely halogen façade around four main light features that could be played like an instrument. It was immediately accoladed by the Illuminating Engineering Society.
With the onset of the energy crisis the New 42nd Street Studios were forced first to reduce the functioning hours of the high energy consuming lighting, and then to contemplate either turning it off entirely or rethinking the concept.
They chose the latter, and 18 months ago Anne Militello was reapproached. She says: "The first design had been from an era before LED fixtures came along. Now there were major companies like Color Kinetics, of course, but I knew there had to be alternatives - I wanted to look worldwide and tested products from everywhere."
She arranged a shoot-out on site and reports, "The Coemar ParLite LED was by far the brightest."
Where the ParLite LEDs are fixed directly to the building they feature on every floor - but elsewhere, since the building is of glazed construction, the architects built an armature which protrudes and supports stainless steel fins, which in turn resemble Venetian blinds.
"On each floor there is a catwalk in order for the windows to be cleaned; we placed the lights on these catwalks and pointed them up and away from from the building, and then adjusted the angle of the metal louvres so they would reflect perfectly onto the street."
At the same time the façade was reworked, extending the troughs that held the Coemar units, which required the installation of new brackets.
With the focus in place Militello concentrated on the content and delivery. "Because we had the ability to do virtually anything with this control system I made a series of around 700 moving paintings - from a vivid zig zag or a soft wash in pink. With the Pharos [architectural control system] we could make videos in my studio, store them in Final Cut Pro and set them into the system to project any abstract - including the Empire State Building and World Trade Tower."
The lighting is triggered daily from a time clock using two Pharos devices, programmed by Broadway freelance artist, Ryan O'Gara with an ETC Expression DMX controller (which would talk directly to the Coemar DMX fixtures). The show activates at dusk and powers off at 2am. The images are fed into the Pharos and different shows play every night of the week using pixel-mapping technology. "We stretched the console to the limits and made it do things it had never been asked to do before," said Militello.
(Jim Evans)
