Sill Lighting’s 485 series buried uplighters were selected to play a key role in illuminating the plaza area of the impressive 30 St Mary Axe, winner of this year’s prestigious Stirling Prize.

Lighting architects Speirs & Major Associates were appointed to deliver a creative, high quality light design for public and private areas of the building and its environ. They were also charged with controlling the image of the tower in its context after dark.

Over 50 of Sill’s special buried uplighters illuminate the ‘A’ frame columns around the perimeter of the building, which is a major element of the plaza lighting scheme. As well as illuminating the covered arcade, the uplit structure provides reflected light to the area around the building. This contributes to the lighting concept for the plaza, which was to avoid cluttering the space with light columns.
The Sill 485 series fittings were specified as the scheme required a shallow recess fitting with adjustable optics that could take a range of reeded glass and louvre accessories. This was essential to overcome restrictions of the mounting positions for the buried uplights in relation to the columns, which were caused by building structure constraints, both above and below ground.
James Newton of Speirs & Major Associates comments, “ Sill was also able to provide a stainless steel collar detail that raises the fitting out of the ground slightly, effectively creating a semi-recessed uplight. This was developed to overcome the problem of lack of recess depth at the base of the columns.”
He adds, “ The performance of the Sill fittings is good and the columns are uniformly illuminated from top to bottom. Given the distance from the base of the columns to the fittings, the glass tilt lenses are very effectively illuminating the column bases”.
The customised fittings use 35w CDM-T lamps and also have a blue trim for decorative effect in the ground.

Swiss Re wins the Stirling Prize for Architecture.

30 St Mary Axe, designed by Foster and Partners, beat off stiff competition from five other outstanding examples of British architecture. The other shortlisted buildings were: Kunsthaus, Graz by Peter Cook and Colin Fournier, The Spire, Dublin by Ian Ritchie Architects, Imperial War Museum North, Manchester by Studio Daniel Libeskind, Phoenix Initiative, Coventry by MacCormac Jamieson Prichard and the Business Academy Bexley, also by Foster and Partners.

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