Ramus designs Melbourne’s first weather-reactive light installation, The Light House at 888 Collins Street. Towering lines of LED light cleverly combine to create a luminous façade that responds to rainfall, cloud-cover, wind speed and temperature.

Tapping into Melbourne's collective weather watching obsession, 888 Collins Street was developed as Melbourne’s first real-time weather display. Towering lines of LED lights cleverly combine to create a luminous façade that responds to rainfall, cloud cover, wind speed and temperature. The 15-storey residential development is wrapped in a luminous skin that interprets incoming weather data and translates it into beautiful digital visualizations. On the hour, the building displays the next day’s forecast from a Bureau of Meteorology data feed. At all other times, the façade reflects real-time weather conditions collected by a weather station installed on the rooftop. Content is displayed across 2.4km of custom designed and fabricated linear LED light fixtures embedded into thirty-five full height vertical fins that flank 5,500m2 of building façade. The entire building is illuminated by the energy produced by solar panels installed on the building.

http://ramus.com.au/portfolios/888-collins/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ybz2Nhx4GDo&t=42s

http://www.docklandsnews.com.au/editions/article/888-collins-st-lights-up_10814/

Details

Building or project owner : Lendlease

Architecture : Woods Bagot

Project artist/ concept/ design/ planning : Ramus

Structural engineering : Van Der Meer Consulting

Facade design : Lend Lease

Facade construction : Adherettes

Kinetic engineering : Lend Lease

Light design : Ramus

Technical layout light : Ramus

Display content/ visuals/ showreel : Ramus

Light hardware (LED hardware) : Big Screen Projects

Lighting control software : Ramus and Iion

Project co-ordination : Ramus

Membrane skin : Ramus

Interaction design/ programming : Iion

Project sponsor/ support : Victoria Harbour

Descriptions

Facade type and geometry (structure) : 888 Collins St is a residential building and is the canvas for a word-first artistic light display that’s as practical and beautiful. Featuring vertical beams of LED lights that extend up to 50 metres high, the display will be controlled by a weather station on the roof of the building that combines with the Bureau of Meteorology’s weather feed.

Kind of light creation : The Light House: 888 Collins St is a weather-reactive light facade made of 35 vertical beams of LED light. Each pixel acts as a low-resolution screen, displaying a whole new light language that visually interprets the weather, which was envisioned and formulated by Ramus.

Resolution and transmitting behaviour : Content is displayed across 2.4km of custom designed and fabricated linear LED light fixtures embedded into thirty-five full height vertical fins that flank 5,500m2 of building façade. The entire building is illuminated by the energy produced by solar panels installed on the building.

Pixel distance : The interactive beams will then reflect environmental conditions based on real-time weather data that “makes the light move in ways that can either display a literal forecaster for the following day or a more artistic interpretation of how the weather ‘feels’”.

Urban situation : The Light House: 888 Collins st was built for the purpose of giving the community a captivating, connective meeting point, giving them a point of connection to the architecture and an understanding that it reflects them and their environment.

Description of showreel : See the installation in full weather-predictive mode here. https://vimeo.com/118203482

Participatory architecture & urban interaction

Community or communities involved : This facade interprets real-time weather data, giving the community an instant sense of enjoyment as they see their own environment visual reinterpreted onto the building.

Host organization : Ramus

Legal form : Please contact me for more details.

Impact : This world-first installation is environmentally friendly and sustainable, as it is run by solar power. The lights themselves have a lifespan of approximately 100,000 hours which equates to about 30 years of use and it’s powered by solar panels, so it is self-sustaining. All design steps are being taken to ensure it is a low maintenance project.

Mediacredits

David Russell

David Russell

David Russell