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Floodlighting Techniques in Building Exterior Lighting

More than ten years ago, when "nightlife" began to become a symbol of people's wealth of life, urban lighting officially entered the category of urban residents and managers. When the night expression was given to buildings from scratch, "flooding" began. The "black language" in the industry is used to describe the method of directly setting up lights to light the building.

Therefore, flood lighting is actually one of the classic methods of architectural lighting. Even today, even if many methods are changed or eliminated with the progress of design and lighting technology, there are still many well-known buildings at home and abroad. This classic technique is retained.

 image0011Picture: Night lighting of the Colosseum

In the daytime, the buildings are hailed as the city's frozen music, and the lights at night give these music beating notes. The architectural appearance of modern cities is not simply flooded and illuminated, but the structure and style of the building itself are re-conceived and aesthetically reflected under the light.

At present, the most widely used floodlighting decoration lighting technology for building exterior lighting is not simple floodlighting and lighting, but the integration of lighting landscape art and technology. Its design and construction should be configured with different floodlights according to the status, function, and characteristics of the building. Lamps and lanterns in order to reflect different light language in different parts of the building and different functional areas.

Installation location and quantity of floodlights

According to the characteristics of the building itself, the floodlights should be set at a certain distance away from the building as much as possible. In order to obtain a more uniform brightness, the ratio of the distance to the height of the building should not be less than 1/10. If the conditions are restricted, the floodlight can be installed directly on the building body. In the facade structure design of some foreign buildings, the appearance of the lighting needs is considered. There is a special installation platform reserved for floodlight installation, so After the floodlighting equipment is installed, the light will not be visible, so as to maintain the integrity of the building facade.image0021

Picture: Place floodlights under the building, when the facade of the building is lit, the unlit side will appear, with the light and dark interlacing, restoring the three-dimensional sense of light and shadow of the building. (Hand-painted: Liang He Lego)

The length of the floodlights installed on the building body should be controlled within 0.7m-1m to avoid the occurrence of light spots. The distance between the lamp and the building is related to the beam type of the floodlight and the height of the building. At the same time, factors such as the color of the illuminated facade and the brightness of the surrounding environment are considered. When the beam of the floodlight has a narrow light distribution and the wall illuminance requirements are high, the illuminated object is dark, and the surrounding environment is bright, a denser lighting method can be used, otherwise the light interval can be increased.

The color of the floodlight is determined

Generally speaking, the focus of building exterior lighting is to use light to reflect the beauty of the building, and use a light source with strong color rendering to show the original color of the building during the day.

Don't try to use light color to change the exterior color of the building, but should use close light color to illuminate or strengthen according to the material and color quality of the building body. For example, golden roofs often use yellowish high-pressure sodium light sources to enhance lighting, and cyan roofs and walls use metal halide light sources with whiter and better color rendering.

The lighting of multiple color light sources is only suitable for short-term occasions, and it is best not to be used for permanent projection settings of the appearance of the building, because colored light is very easy to cause visual fatigue under the shadow of the shadow.image0031

Picture: The Italian National Pavilion at Expo 2015 only uses floodlighting for the building. It is difficult to illuminate a white surface. When choosing a light color, it is important to grasp the "white body" color point. This surface is a rough matte material. It is correct to use a long-distance and large-area projection. The projection angle of the floodlight also makes the light color "gradual" from bottom to top to fade out, which is quite beautiful. (Image source: Google)

The projection angle and direction of the floodlight

Excessive diffusion and average lighting direction will make the sense of subjectivity of the building disappear. In order to make the building surface look more balanced, the layout of the lamps should pay attention to the comfort of the visual function. The light on the illuminated surface seen in a field of view should come from In the same direction, through regular shadows, a clear sense of subjectivity is formed.

However, if the lighting direction is too single, it will make the shadows hard and produce an unpleasant strong contrast between light and dark. Therefore, in order to avoid destroying the uniformity of the front lighting, for the sharply changing part of the building, weaker light can be used to make the shadow soft within the range of 90 degrees in the main lighting direction.

It is worth mentioning that the bright and shadow shaping of the building appearance should follow the principle of designing in the direction of the main observer. It is necessary to make multiple adjustments to the installation point and projection angle of the floodlight during the construction and debugging stage.

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Picture: The Pope's Pavilion at the Expo 2015 in Milan, Italy. A row of wall washer lights on the ground below illuminate upwards, with low power, and their function is to reflect the overall bending and bumpy feeling of the building. In addition, on the far right, there is a high-power floodlight that illuminates the protruding fonts and casts shadows on the wall. (Image source: Google)

At present, the night scene lighting of many buildings often uses a single floodlighting. The lighting lacks levels, consumes a lot of energy, and is prone to light pollution problems. Advocate the use of diversified spatial three-dimensional lighting, comprehensive use of flood lighting, contour lighting, internal translucent lighting, dynamic lighting and other methods.


Post time: Jul-22-2021