LED Testing & Application  

Change of Heart

The façade of a new Tijuana building pumps with blue and red light—an emblem of new life in a troubled city

BY ELIZABETH HALL

Outfitted with a high-end restaurant, an elevated running track and an attention-grabbing, color-changing LED façade, VIA Corporativo is hardly the type of contemporary mixed-use building you’d expect to find in Tijuana, Mexico. And that’s precisely the point. “People think of Tijuana and they think drug wars,” says architect Ramón Guillot Lapiedra, EstudioARG, Tijuana. “We wanted to transmit something else by creating a building that would shed a different light on the city and help its image; we wanted to make a statement.”

The building’s façade lighting does just that. Designed by Guillot Lapiedra and lighting designer Ron Neal of Ron Neal Lighting Design in Carlsbad, CA, it comprises static blue LEDs that illuminate a seven-and-a-half-story aluminum architectural skin, static red LEDs that light the eighth-story roof, and color-changing LEDs that switch between blue and red in the eight-story air chamber that punctuates the middle of the building’s north side.

LEDs also illuminate the adjacent 150-ft-tall concrete tower that houses the elevators and restrooms, and is connected to the main building by a 5-meter-long bridge, as well as the building’s lobby, which sits at the base of the tower. The lighting not only gave the building a recognizable identity, it also helped VIA Corporativo become the first building in the region to earn LEED Gold certification.

BLUE SHOWS THE WAY
The Spanish word “via” translates to “the way,” a term that inspired the design. “The concept was based on a ‘way’ to increase the quality of life for the occupants by integrating things that would make people comfortable, and that includes lighting. We wanted lighting not only to be functional, but to inspire people,” says Neal.

Lighting also served as a way to alter the perception of Tijuana through use of color, specifically blue, a color that connotes safety and peace, says Guillot Lapiedra, who used blue LEDs to illuminate the perforated aluminum skin that shrouds three sides of the building.

During the day, the skin acts as an insulation device that lowers the building’s radiant heat while preserving views to the outside. (Thermally separated, double-pane windows further cool the building; Guillot Lapiedra estimates that it uses only natural ventilation for three-quarters of the year.) The curved, wavy skin protects the building by blocking winds, including the strong Santa Ana winds which are deflected by the convex portion of the skin.

At night, more than 400 blue LEDs mounted on the inside edge of the scrim reflect onto the building’s glass-and-metal façade and back onto the exterior aluminum skin to transform the façade into a glowing lantern. Red LED luminaires mounted outside of the eighth-story parapet wash the underside of the roof for an interesting color contrast. (All LED façade lighting used on the project is Philips Color Kinetics with the exception of the blue LEDs, which were sourced by EstudioARG.)

A HEART BEATS AT THE CORE
The north-facing side of the building—which is exposed to less sunlight—is the only portion of the façade not covered by aluminum skin. For colorful nighttime lighting on this side of the building, Neal suggested LEDs to illuminate the air chamber, a main artery that connects the lower-level parking garage with the main eight stories of commercial space above and the adjoining concrete tower. Topped with a low-e glass-coated skylight, the chamber brings natural light to the office areas on each floor. What’s more, “it’s a vein, a heart, a sculpture that helps communicate between all the spaces within the building,” says Guillot Lapiedra.

Positioning the LEDs to achieve the right effect was a challenge given the air chamber’s complex shape. In the center of the north side, the air chamber sits half outside, half inside the building. The outward-facing half of the chamber is fitted with a perforated metal scrim inside the green-tinted glass. On each floor, six LED luminaires were mounted to the exterior ceiling outside of the chamber glass “to wash the building scrim. We knew we’d be able to get light through that scrim onto the reflective glass spaces within the chamber. The light gets telegraphed into other spaces through the reflections,” says Neal.

Rather than adding a third color to an already bold façade, “we dialed in precisely 50 percent of the red and blue colors to create magenta, which is an amalgam of the roof and façade,” says Neal. Turned on from dusk to dawn, the RGB LED luminaires change color approximately every 15 minutes, shifting from red to magenta to blue.

LIGHTING THE VOID
On the opposite side of the building, the lighting for the 150-ft-tall concrete tower makes a different statement. “It’s a solid structure with a void of light [to demonstrate] the idea that ‘within a void there is the light,’” says Guillot Lapiedra. The “void” is represented by an eight-story recession in one of the tower’s four sides. The negative corner was then filled with light, using only one high-output LED floodlight to uplight the void. A warm-white color was selected “to keep it neutral. We wanted to distinguish that element and to identify it as its own form, but we didn’t want to introduce another color to the façade lighting scheme,” explains Neal.

At the base of the tower is the two-story lobby. Here, white LEDs reveal a colorful architectural element—translucent red glass panels that line the lobby wall. As in the air chamber, Guillot Lapiedra wanted the lobby panels to have an asymmetrical shape, so randomly positioned, 10-deg LED luminaires graze the panels from behind to create an abstract pattern. Visible through the green-tinted lobby doors, the interior panels are a sign that the building’s commitment to color is more than just skin deep.

Photos: Carlos Varela

September 2011