Pharos 20th anniversary podcast series examines new frontiers

Pushing Boundaries: 20th anniversary campaign continues with the release of four new podcast episodes

Pharos Architectural Controls has a distinguished history of supporting projects that have pushed boundaries – in terms of scale, complexity and in some cases, sheer audaciousness. As part of its 20th anniversary celebrations, the controls manufacturer has released a new set of podcast episodes focusing on some of the more wacky, wondrous and other-worldly projects to have exceeded the limits of what was thought possible from a technological perspective, but also in terms of innovation and imagination.

The ‘20 Years of Pharos’ campaign is spotlighting ten lighting professionals and ten projects that have shaped the success of the company over the last two decades.

Seminal lighting professionals Alan McIntosh from Mulvey & Banani Lighting, Inc and Torben Skov Hansen from Chromaviso both feature in this tranche of the campaign, discussing how they have each made their own impacts on the industry – in very different ways.

Boundary-pushing projects featured as part of the campaign include Bridge of Peace in Georgia and the awe-inspiring art installation, Untitled (UFO), which took flight in 2008 – much to the delight of thousands of onlookers in London, Prague, Rio and California. Podcast interviews with Marco de Boer from Primo Exposures and Dominic Harris from Cinimod Studios explore these incredible projects in more detail.

As well as providing rich insights and personal stories, the podcasts will cover how Pharos technology enabled visionaries to realise their briefs and – in many cases – completely exceed them.

Alan McIntosh – Mulvey & Banani Lighting Inc

VP and partner of Mulvey & Banani Lighting Inc, Alan McIntosh, has been with the company for 14 years after spending over a decade working on TV and theatrical lighting touring as a technical director where he gained valuable experience working with dynamic lighting.

“The touring aspect of being a theatrical tech director really encouraged a boundary-pushing mindset, which was a priceless experience and knowledge-gathering time for me. Mulvey & Banani takes on a lot of ambitious urban design projects – many of which are dynamic in nature: a particular passion of mine. We take care of small public art installations to huge-scale wonders of the world, and everything in between.

“Pharos had always been used by the team at Mulvey – they have become one of our standard controls provider, but my first experience of using Pharos control to great effect was on the Bloor Street Benches project in Toronto, which could be described as the Fifth Avenue of Canada. This project was one of the first projects where we worked in direct collaboration with the Pharos team, rather than just specifying them as a contractor would.

“The concept came as a result of an art competition set by the local Business Improvement Association (BIA), to revitalize the urban street scape and make the space more inviting.  Our firm teamed up with landscape architect, DTAH, and came up with the concept of creating stylized public benches that were themed as urban fire pits. These benches lined the corridor and provided a place that was intended to bring people together and provide a sense of warmth and community, on what is a very busy street filled with high end retail, restaurants and constant foot traffic.

“The benches were etched with flames, with lighting integrated inside them that – if the visitor pushed a sensor – would transform from a static look into a flame-flickering, dynamic look. From there, the scene would play for 2-3 minutes and then revert back to its static scene. Each bench had its own independent controller, while the local program to each bench could be overridden, should the need arise to change all the benches at once by the technical operators. The show on each bench had an astronomical calendar that was programmed for ten years, which included programs and scenes, based on what the client wanted, including Father’s Day, Halloween, Easter, etc. All the benches would trigger in uniform illumination.

“The client also decided they wanted to throw in a show every 15 minutes, which switched the fire mode onto all the benches simultaneously., before reverting back. It was ambitious – there were 63 benches eventually installed along Bloor Street and they are still working well, with a couple of tweaks here and there to update in line with the client’s requirements.”

The Bloor Street Benches project is one of the largest deployments of single Pharos controllers, programmed to work individually and as a collective, to achieve the required objective for the client.

Alan continued: “As well as winning the art competition, we have received several accolades for that project and really shows how we want to continue to push boundaries and innovate to create something really special, that we can be really proud of. The production and live event background mentality came to the fore to help us to overcome hiccups and problems that really pushed that project forward and realise its full potential.”

Torben Skov Hansen – Chromaviso

Chromaviso has been specialising in healthcare lighting for the last 18 years and began its working relationship with Pharos in 2012.

Torben explains: “The first years of the business were spent providing a completely novel kind of lighting into operating theatres, so very specialist indeed. The partnership with Pharos came as a result of some work we did with a surgeon who had the idea to combine architectural lighting and room lighting with colour mixing, in order to enhance his visible performance, increase the working environment and thus, his work as a surgeon.

Chromaviso’s founders were well-versed in architainment lighting and acquainted with DMX, and so the innovation in this space was born. To begin with, it was all about controlling lighting in that one room – the operating theatre – and they had their own developed control system for that, which worked well.

“When I joined the company, we expanded the business into multiroom control and larger areas of hospitals – staying in that health and care space. Pharos was the obvious choice for enabling that multiroom control.”

Chromaviso has coined the term ‘light as medicine’ and has continued to innovate in the niche sector of healthcare lighting – both from a patient care standpoint and from an ergonomic perspective, to support the work of the staff working within these environments.

Torben continued: “It’s a unique application in which to use Pharos technology. The benefits and the beauty of this partnership have been proven over and over again. One such example comes to mind when we worked on a Danish psychiatric hospital, which was over 8,000 sqm with 116 patient wards, that had to be completely integrated with circadian rhythm. This meant that some 1,100 six-channel luminaires had to be controlled within that site, which Pharos could easily cover, but the peculiarity was integrating it into the building automation: The user panels, motion sensors, centralised touch-based user interfaces, used both for monitoring, surveillance and multiroom control, was something that we built together on those early projects.

“KMX has emerged as the building automation standard where we are active, so we do that in many cases, particularly on larger projects. This web server – web-based multiroom control and monitoring system that we have developed with Pharos is present across more than 100 hospitals across Scandinavia. These circadian installations have found their way into some further 50-60 installations across elderly care institutions, with the same amount again present in psychiatry, intensive care and neonatal units. In every clinical area active 24/7, our technology will be used and we continue to use the same principles as we did in the beginning.

“In healthcare settings, the lighting design has to work hard to fulfil a multitude of conflicting briefs at the same time, including balancing the benefits for staff in a complex working environment, while aiding the patients around them, who are trying to rest and recover. The evidence and knowledge around light interaction with humans, depending on the health condition they struggle with, has really deepened in recent years, and so our approach has become more advanced in ways that we can support healing and recuperation.

“This is the core value that we provide to the market and Pharos really has been instrumental in enabling us to push those boundaries to innovate in this sector.”

Bridge of Peace, Georgia

Marco de Boar from Primo Exposures codesigned the Bridge of Peace with lighting designer Philippe Martinaud from FOCAL, to complement the overall vision for the structure by architect, Michele De Lucchi. “My dear friend Philippe brought me in on the projects in Georgia, which started with the TV Tower and the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 2008. These projects were my first encounter with Pharos and that relationship continued with the Presidential Palace project in 2009. In December 2009, we got the first calls for the Bridge of Peace, starting with final design and production in Feb 2010.

“The bridge was constructed in Verona, Italy, then cut into pieces and transported via 200 trucks, into Georgia. It was reconstructed, where the glass and lighting elements were added, before being pontooned over to the other side of the river, where the build and install was completed. It was a true feat of scale and engineering.”

The bridge itself comprises a toughened glass parapet, with 2 x 175m of LEDs (the span of the bridge); 1,250 units inside the roof section of the bridge to illuminate the Meccano. Almost 200 sensors to make the programs follow the pedestrians who walked over it. There are five Pharos LPC 1s (Lighting Playback Controller) and three LPC 2s to help deliver the complex lighting programme on the bridge, supported by 27 Pharos Designer RIOs – most of which service the sensors on the bridge parapet.

Tim Edwards, Operations Director at Pharos, took the lead on the project from the Pharos side of things. He added: “The commissioning for the bridge was done in two phases: The bridge roof, followed a few weeks later, by the walkway. The first phase was near-perfect, which is testament to Marco and the team as that so rarely happens. Phase two was very different with lots more challenges, as the programming for the bridge itself was much more complex. We had problems with earthing, which upset a lot of our gear, but we worked it through to stay on track. The scale of the project was quite something too: to have that many inputs into the system, it is always going to need some ironing out. Deadlines were tight too, so we were under pressure.

“The design of the bridge also incorporated messages of peace, transmitted in light via morse code that travel along the sides of the bridge. This required some completely fresh programming within the Pharos software, which took some support from our team but worked out beautifully.”

Marco continued: “We had the fixtures produced and engineered the complete system, as well as doing all the on-site management. It was a huge project – certainly the biggest I have ever done, but it was a lot of fun. The support we got from the Pharos team brought everything together to really make the design work, in a time when LED projects were pioneering in the industry. A special mention to RENA who made the LED fixtures – the way they prepared the products for quick on-site installation really made a huge difference to us under pressure.”

The Bridge of Peace continues to wow visitors with its simple, beautiful white lighting displays, interactivity and message of peace. Marco concluded: “It’s listed as one of the top five pedestrian bridges in the world. That’s quite a legacy.”

Untitled (UFO)

Cinimod Studios is renowned for using lighting and video to create unique projects so when Dominic Harris received the brief to create a UFO (unidentified flying object) that would fly over the skies of London, Gdansk, Rio de Janeiro and Barstow, CA, he couldn’t refuse.

“I’ve become a world expert on creating UFOs, which is quite a niche area to be working in, but when a company – like Microsoft with its Halo 4 launch – or an artist, finds themselves in need of one, they tend to come to me. They are hard projects to conceive, design and deliver and with a huge amount of challenges to overcome in the execution.

“The whole project initially came about as a collaboration with the US artist, Peter Coffin. It was his vision and he’d wanted to do it for a long time, but he had found it a really difficult project to get ‘off the ground’. He came to Cinimod Studios with the conundrum and we broke it down into its component parts: What does a UFO look like at night? How do you physically construct it and then, how are we going to fly it? But then, if we are going to make this spectacle, we want people to see it, which is where the lighting comes into play.

“The challenge with Untitled (UFO) wasn’t just a feat of getting these huge structures (which were initially 8m, but grew to 15m) off the ground, we needed to build them with the level of lighting that was supported with its own power source. Of course, there was this brain in it, which controlled how the UFO behaved, and that could be controlled remotely from the ground.

“There weren’t many people at that time around who had solid state, robust bits of kit that could drive large amounts of RGB LED pixels individually and could do it in a way that you could pre-visualise testing that out. The Pharos LPC took every bit of shock and vibration and could deliver everything we needed, leaving Peter and I free to design and test out patterns and see everything unfold in flight.”

The lighting on the structure became pivotal and provided the visual spectacle that was enjoyed from the ground, by onlookers in cities across the globe.

“The lighting brief and the aesthetic for Untitled (UFO) changed depending on the country we were flying in” explained Dominic. “Flight control rights meant that in some areas, we could fly the helicopter with all its lights off, as the UFO itself was considered bright enough to mark its location in the sky. This made the view of the piece even more striking in the night sky. In Barstow, California, the flight path took a route over the mountains and then over the Skyline Drive-In open air cinema, where the band Beck was performing and the UFO would form part of their set. The helicopter was able to fly with its lights off and the light emanating from the UFO enabled the pilot to light the way safely through the mountain valley.”

The governing safety we followed meant that there could be nothing between the helicopter and the UFO, other than the strop line itself, which required the UFO to be a completely self-contained unit, with regards to power and data. The peculiarities of a project like this came with several technical challenges, but having the support of the Pharos team on hand to help – day and night – ensured that the UFO would take flight on time and in all its glory.

Dominic said: “The business we are in is that everything has to be perfect on the night, so having that back-up and support was vital; in those moments where we needed it, it was priceless.”

Simon Hicks, CEO of Pharos Architectural Controls, joined Dominic on the podcast and recalls being a part of the support team for the UFO project. “There weren’t many solutions that could control that many fixtures in a solid-state form and, at that time, there weren’t even many Pharos units manufactured – the UFO was one of the first projects to use the LPC X, which we were still building to order in our small office in Shepherd’s Bush. Had there been a problem – as well there might with a new product entering such unfamiliar territory as a UFO – the only backup unit was the one we had in the office to replicate Dominic’s setup and provide technical support. It was an exhilarating project to be part of!”

Dominic added: “I would hazard a guess that there aren’t many Pharos controllers that have flown over three continents of the globe, like the one fitted to the UFO. A special accolade indeed.”

The full interviews can be viewed here:

Alan: https://youtu.be/KrW754LzXRs?si=IK0OPp_QieLzWUDM  

Torben: https://youtu.be/ws2dhrWcJ-g?si=5JBIwBK8VUaE63ex  

Bridge of Peace: https://youtu.be/sRTGEHHdPY4?si=mscoj9y44Wa_nlsJ  

Untitled (UFO): https://youtu.be/yfMdPLir1NQ?si=PasPUYxUUevOPFcb 

The next installment of the ‘20 years of Pharos’ podcast series, focusing on Scalability, is due to be released in November.