Lighting Up The City’s Night Skyline

Mumbai October 29 2013: As the construction boom carries on in Mumbai, we are greeted by high rise commercial and residential structures that are defining the skyline of the city. Most of these tall structures, which display a great view during the day, somehow get lost during the night due to lack of planning in providing a night view in the conceptual stage. Exterior lighting or façade lighting isn’t a concept that has attained popularity so far in the industry and has thus been neglected. Whatever exterior lighting that one has come across so far was limited to star rated hotels and monuments.

All this is set to change as more and more developers are now getting aware of the importance of having a night view in addition to the look of the structure during daytime, characterized mostly with glass facades. At least one of the commercial projects that we know of who has assigned the services for exterior lighting is the upcoming Century Bhavan project of the Birla group at Worli. LDP Visual Planners, a lighting design company from Australia having its offices in Sydney, Auckland, Singapore and Shanghai, is all set to light up the upcoming property with lighting design technology that has been used to light up structures all over the world.

Dhruvajyoti Ghose, Managing Director of LDP, who was in the city recently looked quite upbeat about his new assignment as he commented, “This is our first assignment in this country as far as office buildings are concerned and would be happy if we can make this a benchmark for others to follow which will be a good trend for commercial structures. We already have completed projects in Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai and Jaipur in retail, heritage and infrastructure sectors”.

More than 80% of the lights used to light up the exterior of the building are LEDs keeping in mind that lighting up of commercial buildings has to be carried out under the green building guidelines with all credits to be taken care of while planning for illumination. Dhruvajyoti Ghose has recently attained LEED AP credentials as part of LDP’s commitment towards sustainable design initiatives and is in total control of this development under the specified guidelines. He elaborates, “The group is founded on backgrounds and qualifications in architecture, stage lighting, interior design and illuminating engineering. Several team members hold post-graduate qualifications in light and lighting. We see lighting as the way of progress and good lighting is essential for good quality environment with utmost care taken not to be detrimental to it. Mumbai is a vibrant market with an aggressive environment and we are not here for experiments, we know what we can achieve”.

Sharing an industry perspective on this new development, Rajesh Prasad, Sr. Associate Director, CB Richard Ellis (CBRE), comments, “Such features are more than welcome and help break the monotony within the high rise structures, typical with glass facades that we have got used to seeing. This will probably pave the way for many more such new developments in the industry”.

Mr. R Lalwani, President (Commercial) Century International, comments, “Ours is an iconic building at a landmark destination with all modern amenities and in no manner would we have left this fantastic aspect of lighting from the many features that we have. We see ourselves as trendsetters as far as this feature is concerned and expect many more to follow”.

A night skyline is something that our vibrant city was missing and we hope that the trend continues to provide it the same. CCI Newswire