The Event Centre, Ayia Napa, Cyprus
Illumination Physics worked with Cypriot lighting designers Archtube to illuminate the new Event Centre at the luxurious Ayia Napa Marina.
Situated on the south eastern coast of Cyprus, Ayia Napa Marina offers a unique lifestyle and experience – from luxurious residences and yachting facilities to waterfront dining options. At the heart of the 98 acre resort, built on its own jetty, lies the Event Centre.
An elliptical, organically conical glass and metal building, it is a destination venue and one-of-a-kind architectural marvel in Cyprus, designed for spacious open-air and indoor events.
Cypriot lighting designers Archtube conceived of a dynamic RGBW lighting plot that brings the Event Centre to life, creating scenes and evoking different moods and reactions, depending on the use of the Event Centre on a given occasion. To achieve this, Archtube called on fixtures from Illumination Physics.
The Event Centre is wrapped by a veil of vertical sun shade fins in five levels, each inclined progressively and slightly differently. The lighting design intention was to illuminate a pair of fins by placing a single light fixture between them at the base of each level – requiring 740 fixtures in total.
Individual control of each fixture was required to create dynamic lighting based on content; the illumination of the fins also needed to be as homogenous as possible, with light trespass to be reduced as much as the up-lighting concept would allow. A suite of different lighting programmes was therefore provided in such a way that the client could easily manually select a particular programme to suit a specific event, or as a default, an automatic schedule runs the day to day lighting displays.
Exactly how this would be done involved many calculations and evaluations, including a 1:1 mock-up in Illumination Physics’ Hong Kong office – two fins were fabricated to match the precise dimensions and profiles of the Event Centre to create a part of one of the five layers of fins.
Numerous luminaires were modelled and tested, but eventually a customised version of the smallest of Illumination Physics’ Circular Wash Light series was selected – the luminaire could be aimed in pan and tilt, which was essential since it would always need fine adjustment to be perfectly vertical in pan, and tilt was different for every fin.
The choice of LED and accompanying optics was the next challenge – 10W from a single 4-in-1 RGBW LED was sufficient in terms of power, provided it was lensed correctly. A custom lens based on an asymmetrical format was therefore developed.
Illumination Physics also designed the Artnet/DMX network and electrical wiring, and provided detailed schematics for the electrical installer to follow during installation. The system is made of a custom server for the Madrix control system running Madrix 5 lighting control software.
Great architecture deserves to be celebrated at night, but the lighting of the Ayia Napa Marina Event Centre does more than that – it conveys emotion and mood, a sense of purpose, and commands to be the centre of attention.
