Targetti news - EVENTS - LUCEVIVA at Luminale 2006

Luminale is an event taking place in Frankfurt during the Light + Building exhibition period. It brings into the City the themes of lighting and architecture featured at Light+Building, under the form of application examples.

At Luminale 2006 Targetti has teamed up with Lighting Designer Andrea Nusser. The result of this collaboration will be an innovative illumination for the façade of the Skyper, a new prestigious building in the city financial district. The project will provide the opportunity for displaying a real application of LUCEVIVA, the new range of Targetti fixtures for architectural dynamic lighting.

The Frankfurt skyline is today the trademark of Germany’s commercial capital throughout the world. This unique scenario has now a new protagonist: the Skyper, a three part building complex consisting of a 154 metre high skyscraper, an historic villa and a modern residential and commercial section.

Situated in the centre of Frankfurt’s financial district, Skyper has been designed by the J.S.K. Architects studio of Frankfurt to become the prestigious headquarters of DekaBank, one of Germany's biggest financial institutions. With a business volume totalling more than EUR 125 billion and subsidiaries in Luxembourg, Switzerland and Ireland, DekaBank has long been a major player in the investment fund sector in particular, with assets under management amounting to more than EUR 135 billion and over five million customer accounts.

Neither the developer nor the planner wished to miss this opportunity to create an architectural dialogue between past and present. The neo-classical villa located at Taunusanlage 1, which has protected building status, has been restored with great respect to its original architectural features and it serves as an entrance to the Skyper complex. The villa is connected with the 38 floor tall skyscraper by a ten metre high hall of glass and thus constitutes an essential part of the whole building. The view up to the skyscraper makes the walk through this glass hall an ongoing and impressive experience.

The Skyper façade illumination system has been designed by “Andrea Nusser – Lighting & Interior Design” in order to satisfy the owner’s desire of making clear that the neoclassic building in front of the skyscraper is the main entrance to the Skyper complex. Light had to be used for modifying the visitor’s perception and to create a smooth connection between the front and the back part of the complex. The design main challenge was highlighting the villa’s door, situated under a elegant balcony with classic columns but appearing rather small compared to the overwhelming size of the glass building on its back.

Andrea Nusser and Johannes Henn have conceived a lighting system which turns the central section of the house, from ground to roof, into an entire entrance block. The side wings of the villa are under-illuminated, thus adding even more emphasis to the centre; a light frame has been created around the architectural central structures, showing the visitors a clear direction into the building. A bright and warm light under the balcony makes the entrance door inviting and important.

The entire lighting system makes use of soft colors; they add elegance and glamour to the grey stone of this old building. Precise colors and hues have been chosen by the owner, as a distinctive element of the DekaBank corporation.

As a final element, in line with the high technology level which we find all over in the Skyper complex, an intelligent lighting control system has been introduced, allowing dynamic color sequences to be automatically programmed and performed in special occasions.

Based on the concept supplied by Andrea Nusser and Johannes Henn, the lighting fixtures for the illumination of the Skyper façade have been specified by architects Giacomo Zadro and Olivia Verdiani, members of the lighting consultancy team of Targetti’s Florence office. The installation consists of an innovative dynamic lighting system, including a wide selection of products belonging to the LUCEVIVA collection, a brand new range of color changing fixtures that is displayed in world-première during the Light + Building exhibition. The system performs automatically several lighting dynamic scenarios, ranging from elegant simple solutions, that highlighting the clean and neo-classic architectural lines of the villa façade, to more creative light-dresses, enriched with softly changing colors, suitable to festive occasions. The lighting control is performed by my-Scenario, a powerful yet friendly interface, specifically designed by Targetti for dynamic lighting installations in architectural environments.