LONDON —Lighting Technology Projects (LTP) specified and supplied 48 custom designed and manufactured trusses to facilitate the house lighting in The Atrium at Westfield London, a new £1.7 billion shopping destination. Part of one of the largest urban shopping destinations in Europe, the atrium was designed by Westfield’s in-house architects with an undulating glass roof made from thousands of glass panels, which are suspended by tree-like support structures.
LTP was referred by architectural/entertainment lighting specialists Architainment to T Clarke, electrical contractors to Westfield. They needed LTP’s experience of integrating theatrical and architectural lighting methodology to provide design support for the trusses including specification of their internal wiring outlets.
The trusses — all 3 meters in length and constructed from Litestructures’ A04 product — are 227 square meters and were rigged in the atrium roof using cherry pickers, with the LTP team working 18 to 20 meters in the air at the highest points.
The crew used Reutlinger wire rope hangers to secure the trusses in place at the correct positions in the roof. These are TUV certified and pre-tested, allowing millimeter accuracy and speedy adjustment and locking, which saved a considerable amount of time with over 200 terminations to complete.
Jonathan Adkins led the LTP site team, and they worked closely with lighting equipment suppliers White Light, who delivered all the lighting fixtures and control for the project. The relevant lights were issued to site enabling LTP to fully prepare the trusses for hanging and raise them to the preordained install positions.
All hooks, clamps and fixings on the trusses, along with the lighting units themselves — including 300 Enlighten/ETC Source Four PARs and Profiles and 100 circuits of architectural lights — are coated in the same white RAL color (9010), effectively making the entire installation almost invisible up in the roof void.
LTP’s biggest challenge was the time frame — they were on site for two weeks — plus the logistics of working around the myriad of other contractors and trades on a busy site in the run up to completion of the project by launch date.
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