intu Lakeside

Location:  Food Court INTU Lakeside, Food Court

Designer:  Rawls

The brief from Rawls was to create a decorative lighting beacon that could be seen from the 2nd floor mall to announce the redevelopment of the 3rd floor food court. The scale of 3rd floor atrium automatically determined that the pendant had to be large to have the impact desired.  It was clear that developing a shade of 4m diameter was going to be a challenge on many levels - structurally fabric was going to be too unpredictable, plus a shade this large was going to need lots of light output, to give it prominence, and to achieve consistent illumination. Maintenance would be a further challenge, with the shade hanging at the top of an escalator in a difficult to access location.

Lighting Design International developed a final design, tailored to the project needs. The shade was made to feel internally illuminated, like the original fabric shade concept, but using a much more robust material, and perforated steel sheet was the ideal solution. Using the perforated sheet for the external lighting allowed us to build up layers of light, with the internal lighting being provided by a separate linear LED light source, and also allowing the shopping centre to use the shades internal face for possible future graphics application.

The final shade incorporates 6 channels of DALI control for internal white lighting, external white lighting, external RGB lighting and high power spotlighting, and the shade weighs in excess of 300kg.