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Relighting the Canadian Senate Chambers: An Exercise in Politics |
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We were invited to participate in a project to relight the Canadian Senate Chambers for television. We knew it would be a challenge. The chamber already had a "TV" lighting system that was used, two or three times a year. The original 1kw PAR64s created an immense heat-load that the air handling system couldn't deal with. On top of this we had to keep the lighting system as unobtrusive as possible and add architectural lighting for the historic paintings and gold-leaf ceiling. We began the design process by rebuilding the chamber in WYSIWYG to give ourselves an accurate representation of what we would be working with. This turned out to be quite a task as the best drawings available were scanned in copies of the original architectural blueprints! There were no as-builts. Once the drawing was complete we were able to start testing various options in a virtual environment, to see how we could best meet the design requirements.
On top of the requirement to light the senators for television, the government was also interested in using the new system during regular senate sessions as well as when tours were going through. The senators not only required decent lighting but they also insisted that the temperature stay low so that they didn't fall asleep and that the lights were not in their eyes. Needless to say, this created some interesting design challenges.
We broke down the venue into a number of sections including the ceiling, the paintings, the galleries, the lobby and aisles plus the senators positions. We chose to use ETC Source 4s and Source 4 PARs for the design. Their light-output was very good, using a 575W bulb. We had all of the fixtures custom painted to match the stonework around the chamber. We also had all of the lenses custom coated with a UV filter to protect the paintings and ceilings from damage.
We ended up using 12 ETC Source4s and 62 ETC Source4 PARs. This was a huge reduction from the original 116, 1kw pars. The Source4s took care of the 8 historic paintings as well as the thrones, plus the entrance to the chamber. The Source4 PARs took care of the senators, the aisles and the ceiling. Once the design was complete we had to prepare for the inevitable committee which was to approve or deny our plan. Using WYSIWYG we created several renderings as well as an animated fly-through of the chamber which gave them a sense of how the new lighting design would look.
The system used ROSCO ET's IPS dimmers, controlled by their VISTA wall panels and programmed with the Horizon software. We set up various scenes to be used, including a look for television, a look for standard Senate sessions and a look for tours. The new lighting system emphasized the beauty of the historic Senate chamber and gave the facility much greater flexibility, while maintaining a very low profile and significantly reducing the heat load on the chamber. |
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