http://www.iguzzini-na.com/en/products/family/wall-mounted-and-ceiling-glim-cube/45/1/192

At 755 feet high, Heron Tower, designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox, is the tallest building in the City of London. To highlight the building's prominence at night, a striking approach to its illumination was adopted by Illuminating Concepts, an American lighting design firm based in Farmington Hills, Michigan. Traditionally, floodlighting such a building would have involved copious amounts of “HID” (High Intensity Discharge) projectors either located remotely from the building and aimed onto it, or located on the façade with fixing systems. These traditional methods consume high levels of energy, and require regular maintenance schedules, which is not an easy task when trying to access luminaires mounted hundreds of feet from the ground on the façade of a building. New LED lighting technology allows us to change radically the way in which we design lighting schemes for modern architecture. Instead of lighting the building we can integrate the lighting into the façade therefore creating a completely different visual perspective of the building at night.

This is the design philosophy undertaken for the external lighting on Heron Tower. The structure framing the building façades creates a grid like pattern onto which individual point source blue LEDs were fixed, punctuating the intersecting points of the building's structure. Illuminating Concepts specified 750 units of iGuzzini's Glim Cube, surface mounted 1 watt fittings for the application. Emitting a blue light, the organized array of Glim Cube luminaires act as finery for this 46 storey jewel within the heart of the city. The visual impact is both dramatic and striking, giving Heron Tower its unique identity and appearance in the City Of London at night. Also of significant importance, this lighting scheme is almost maintenance free and consumes very little energy (less than 1 kw/h), which is in line with Heron Tower's focus on sustainability (the building has a BREEAM rating of ‘Excellent' and incorporates a number of green initiatives including an offset core that prevents solar heat gain and a veil of photovotaic cells on the southern façade). The LED light fixtures have a rated life of 50,000 hours which equates to over 13 years of use with the lighting being switched on for an average of 10 hours every night of the year.