11 Soho Street featured in Lighting Illumination in Architecture

The article by Jill Entwistle is detailed below -

A building on a junction of London’s Oxford Street, designed as a ‘corner beacon’, has been given added night-time presence with the addition of a bespoke colour-changing installation. The eight-storey mixed-use block at 61 Oxford Street designed by AHMM is notable for its undulating glass facade inspired by Alvar Aalto’s 1937 Savoy vase, a curvaceous design classic. Its design also references the oriel or bay windows favoured by retailers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The lighting programme for the Sky Lantern, created for a three-storey corner void in the building by StudioFractal, draws inspiration from the undulating facade and the changing seasons and is based on colours seen in nature.

StudioFractal worked both with AHMM and lighting specialist Architainment to overcome a range of complex technical issues linked to the project including remodelling the lantern’s internal surfaces to optimise its reflectivity. Its design included a space-frame housing 2590 LEDs and associated cabling, installed to follow the undulating facade. Scale models and on-site mock-ups were used both to confirm design details and to carry out initial programming. The scheme uses flexible strands of high-intensity LED nodes from Color Kinetics. The installation’s automatic controls are housed within the lantern but it can be also driven from the building’s reception.