Spectrum

Dappled, Color Corrected Light Enhances Life In A Downtown Development

Written by Joel Svendsen | May 01, 2013

by Stan Schwartz

As part of the revitalization of downtown Salt Lake City, the 23-acre City Creek Center brings business and people back to the heart of town with a walkable place to live, interact, shop, and work. The lighting designers for the project, Horton Lees Brogden (HLB), collaborating with a large team of multiple partners, used a variety of custom and standard luminaires.  These included both decorative and theatrical fixtures.

 

Theatrical luminaires, many equipped with gobos, project soft, dappled light. This reinforces the exterior elemental attributes of the creek winding through the interior property.

 

They also made thoughtful and extensive use of theatrical projections with Rosco gobos and filters for color correction.  HLB selected a color temperature of 3000k to reinforce the warm and welcoming environment.  This, of course, required color filters to balance the sources which included HID, LED and linear fluorescents.

 

Even with the retractable glass roof closed, a sense of light and shadow is ever-present, largely through the meticulous selection of color temperature and the careful selection of gobos.

 

Among the designers’ most interesting innovations was the wide-spread use of Rosco gobos, or theatrical projections to dapple and otherwise change the character of the lighting and the surfaces it illuminates.  Major design challenges included properly lighting the multitudinous architectural elements in conjunction with balancing color and character of lighting in an environment with a fully retractable glass roof, open structures, and circulation paths.  Gobos played an important role in solving these challenges.

CITY CREEK CENTER CREDITS

Master Developer: City Creek Reserve, Inc.
Retail Developer: The Taubman Company

Lighting Design: Horton Lees Brogden Lighting Design
Architects: Hobbs+Black, Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Partnership, Callison
Size: 23 acres; 3 city blocks