PERMANENT INSTALLS

Verizon Building Lighting

In what was once a dark corner of the earth, the Verizon Building in downtown Baltimore gets a permanent lighting install with top of the line LED fixtures featuring color changing capabilities controlled by a phone application.

Verizon’s downtown data center and central switching facility is housed in a black granite, windowless 11 story building. Because of its ominous presence in an otherwise festive, retail corridor of Baltimore, the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore asked Image Engineering to design a way to  brighten up its facade at night.

Image Engineering turned to the world class LED fixtures manufactured by Color Kinetics of Philips Lighting. These fixtures produce nearly 5000 lumens of spectrally pure LED light in red, green, and blue diode arrays. The RGB combination allows Image Engineering’s designers to cast any color of the rainbow onto the buildings surfaces.  Using a specially designed control interface, the lighting display can be pre-programmed to any number of special color combinations to celebrate specific holidays or events. The system even allows for the building owners to change the display on the fly using a custom iphone application.

Due to it’s naturally dark color, the black granite does not reflect light very well. Image Engineering selected CK’s ColorReach fixture, knowing it would be the only fixture commercially available capable of making an impact on the building’s dark and gloomy exterior.  Because the building’s management would not allow any penetration of the exterior wall’s granite covering, Image Engineering’s engineers designed a custom cantilevered bracket system that allowed the lights to be focused in the proper location without having to attach to the exterior wall directly.