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Bloomberg’s European headquarters is located in the heart of the City of London, close to the Bank of England and St. Paul’s Cathedral. It is a beautiful illustration of sustainable development, boasting a BREEAM Outstanding rating, and the highest design-stage score ever achieved by any major office development. In 2018, Bloomberg was awarded the Stirling Prize.
Simmtronic worked closely with building services consultant Grontmij (now Sweco) early on in the project design. Lighting control components were carefully chosen to provide the client with a lighting system in their building which met their needs.
Early on in the project Simmtronic supplied and commissioned lighting control equipment to a mock-up of a floor area in Germany. This enabled the client to see how the lighting and lighting controls would work and make adjustments if required. Another benefit of carrying out a mock-up was that the construction team could use this as a lesson learnt exercise which helped when the same areas on site were constructed for real.
The lighting panels in the open plan office were programmed in a “petal” sequence, which means the central panel above a person would be on fully illuminated, then the surrounding panels would be dimmed. This provides the user with sufficient light to work effectively, but also reduces the lighting energy usage in the surrounding areas.
As the building is used around the clock, occupants found that sometimes they might be the only person left working on a floor outside of normal office hours. The users noticed that luminaires had dimmed down and turned off where there was no occupancy in the surrounding areas. So, the control of the lighting panels was re-programmed to dim down to a low level but not switch off at night, to provide the user on that floor some comfort of not being surrounded by darkness. With such large floors and the lighting originally dimmed to off, the users found this uncomfortable not to be able to see their surroundings.
The presence detectors in the office areas were sprayed with special paint finish to compliment the uniquely designed ceiling so they seamlessly blended in.
The control and operation of back of house areas such as plantrooms were subject to discussion and review. The client decided the lighting would be switched on at full level via a local wall switch, then if the lights had not been manually switched off after a time period of two hours, the lights would all dim to 50% output, so as to alert the user the lights would be turning off shortly. This automatic operation ensured the user had sufficient light to work safely, but the lights would not be left on unnecessarily.
The client wanted a lighting control system which they could maintain and operate themselves once the project was installed and commissioned.
The Simmtronic lighting control system uses:
