Each face appears for five minutes at a time, smiling and grimacing until it purses its lips like a playful modern-day gargoyle and spits out water. A signal is sent back from the Emphasis system to a Barco show controller to control the intensity and colour saturation of the towers' video.
At night, the towers' faces are supplemented by nature images and vivid walls of colour. ETC's Sensor+ dimming system, with its new CEM+ control modules, allows the Emphasis system to speak directly to the dimmer racks via Ethernet to feed data to the 140 ColorBlast LED fixtures, supplied by Color Kinetics, which also greatly reduced wiring requirements during installation. Meanwhile, the Emphasis system controls a series of spotlights at the foot of the towers that illuminate cascades of water flowing down the tower sides. ETC Sensor RCD modules in racks, engineered for wet-use locations, handle the dimming of the spotlights.
The Millennium Park - the largest project carried out by any city in the world to commemorate the new millennium - was opened in July 2004. The converted space transformed old train tracks and car parks into a haven where Chicagoans can congregate and relax surrounded by beauty, as well as enjoy public events, interactive art, free concerts and open-air dining.
The Crown Fountain is a short stroll from Anish Kapoor's titanium bean structure 'Cloudgate' and Frank Gehry's Pritzer Pavilion. A gift to the city from the Crown and Goodman families of Chicago, the structure was designed and constructed with the help of Krueck + Sexton Architects and Crystal Fountains.The fountain's two structures face each other across a shallow 71m long reflecting pool in which visitors can paddle. If the water level in the pool begins to fall below the 3mm mark, sensors on the ETC Emphasis system will turn off the lighting.
ETC's factory field service engineer Mike Skurla says: "Crown Fountain is a superb example of the cross-system integration ETC is increasingly being asked to do for hybrid architectural and entertainment installations. The Emphasis control system is a single solution which operates with the video servers, water pump control system, colour LED mixing fixtures and dimming modules. This level of integration is particularly remarkable because this exhibit operates unattended all day."
Schuler Shook of Chicago was the lighting design firm for most of Millennium Park's elements, which include the lighting design for the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Lurie Garden and the Crown Fountain.
(Lee Baldock)
