Pica Cubes™ Pulse To The Rhythm Inside Club Perle

The Hiltl chain of vegetarian restaurants in Switzerland is listed by the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest of its kind in the world. The renowned, Zurich-based family business recently opened a new location in the city’s busy Langstrasse. On weekend nights, that location's lower-level dining area transforms into a pulsating nightclub with spectacular lighting effects generated by our Rosco Pica Cube 4C LED fixtures.

Hiltl Langstrasse is a multi-purpose venue that features a restaurant, café, cocktail bar, buffet, take-away and a nightclub located in the basement. Downstairs, visitors will find a dining option that serves 50-people at a communal table during the day – and transforms into the stylish Club Perle at night. The central element to this transformation is the lighting, which is programmed to change from a daylight-balanced wash of white light to an animated, kaleidoscope of coloured lighting at night.

Tokyoblue GmbH, an architectural lighting design firm based in Zurich, was responsible for the club’s lighting design. One of their design goals was to backlight the side walls made of sand-lime brick to produce colourful slits of light that could be animated to pulse with the music.

Serge Schmuki, one of the lighting designers at Tokyoblue, created the desired lighting effect by installing Rosco Pica Cube 4C LED fixtures on a track behind the two side walls of the space. Schmuki listed his fixture requirements for this installation: “RGBW- LED, small housing to fit behind the wall, bright output, easy to install/track mount, DMX onboard, and a lens/filter option for light distribution.” The Pica Cube 4C precisely fit that bill.

Compact yet powerful, the Pica Cubes delivered the required brightness and the vibrant colour options Serge needed in this nightclub setting. He also appreciated the Pica Cube Spread Lens Accessories that he used to properly shape the backlighting. He ended up using a combination of the 75°x45° and 60°x10° asymmetrical spread lenses to achieve the optimal beam spread and light distribution across the entire wall.

Perle Manager, Morgan Knöpfler, poses in front of the Club Perle bar with hot pink Pica Cube spots behind him.

The Tokyoblue design team also put the Pica Cube 4C units to work front lighting both the wall behind the bar, as well as the club’s Veli and Amos graffiti wall. The fixtures create animated punctuations of color that are synced to the music and other lighting effects in the club.

To learn more about the fixtures that designer Serge Schmuki used to create the colourful and dynamic lighting inside Club Perle, visit the Pica Cube 4C page on our website.

Club Perle photos courtesy of Hiltl AG