Auckland Harbour Bridge, New Zealand

The Opportunity:

On Auckland Anniversary Weekend, Saturday 27 January 2018, Auckland Harbour Bridge was transformed by the launch of Vector Lights – featuring a ground-breaking renewable energy technology powered light show that ignited imaginations and demonstrated a smarter way to power the city. Vector were looking for a way to illuminate the Harbour Bridge in a highly energy efficient manner. The design had to be sympathetic and able to communicate New Zealand ideals and values.

Mandylights spent a lot of time looking at the physical architecture of the bridge. One of the first things Richard did was to fly to Auckland to spend a night sitting in various locations around the city simply taking in all aspects of the structure. He imagined ways to accentuate what is already there, especially the unique structure of girders that sit under the road.

Environment was probably the biggest challenge for Mandylights, located in the middle of the harbour with the crew getting blasted by winds in excess of 70 Km an hour. Add to that salt spray and in some locations the fixtures are only six metres away from the water.

The Solution:

From the beginning Richard was clear that he wanted to light the Bridge with three types of LED fixtures in three very definite styles. A wash light was required to light the internal structure of the Bridge, a linear strip to outline the entire exterior perimeter of the structure and finally, an LED dot fixture for the 170 diagonals and verticals under the Bridge.

Mandylights looked at a few variations of applicable LED fixtures but found they gravitated towards Martin by HARMAN’s PixLine, VC-Dot, and Exterior Wash products due to their reliability as well as the incredible support offered by HARMAN Professional Solutions country partner, Show Technology.

A total of 90,000 Martin VC-Dots were used on the Bridge marking Martin’s largest ever architectural LED installation. All of the Martin equipment runs off the Martin P3 System Controller which is fed video by two media servers.

The Impact:

We worked extremely closely with Martin on this project,” said Richard. “Martin were really supportive and fantastic to deal with on such a massive undertaking, it was their largest LED installation to date with over 90,000 LEDs installed.”

Martin Exterior Wash 200 were chosen for wash lighting with Richard describing them as incredibly bright and versatile. “We tested these several times in our office and then again on site, and we found them to be simply perfect,” said Richard. “They have really good colour range – especially in the deep blue ranges and importantly, a really easily interchangeable system of frosting so we were able to use the same fixtures all the way across the Bridge.”