The ADM Dynamic Building Facade Project

Sometimes things just perfectly align; circumstance, coincidence and ultimately success. The Abu Dhabi City Municipality (ADM) headquarters dynamic building facade project was one such perfect alignment, that embodies all these aspects. The ADM building was originally designed in the late seventies and opened in 1981. Which does not sound that long ago, but put that in context to the United Arab Emirates which only formed in 1971, and Abu Dhabi, the Capital, which still looked like the below photograph in the late 60s, and one can appreciate that at only 35 years old it is one of the oldest buildings in the capital and therefore part of the Emirates’ history.

ADM management wanted to showcase this building and show off its heritage to create awareness of its importance and need to remain. As too many things in the region, much history has been lost to make way for newer glass and concrete buildings and modern developments and the infrastructure department management, led by the initial idea from Eng. Sami Abdul Qader Alhashmi, did not want the same fact to befall their headquarters. The task of coming up with a design and tender fell to ADM’s resident Lighting Expert at the time, Martin Valentine.

The current building already had extensive exterior lighting floodlighting circuits and good mounting positions and coverage, but fitted with poor quality white LED floodlights and everything time-switch and contactor controlled on and off.

The design called for the existing floodlight locations only to be re-used to provide a dynamic RGBW architectural lighting system and as the exiting 3-core wiring was buried under marble cladding or beneath public walkways, it could not be upgraded. This meant that no additional DMX signal cables could be utilised, and the dynamic nature of the DMX had to be achieved through either a powerline or wireless communication system.

The Tender was issued on this basis and called for tenders to provide a solution to address the lighting coverage as well as a fully addressable dynamic DMX system that could provide nearly 100 different selectable scenes without needing any additional cabling. In addition, the ADM grounds were included in the tender with bespoke columns required that could have the ADM Mashrabiya pattern applied to them.

Ligman initially were proposed for the columns with the unique Vancouver Decorative range providing everything called for within the tender specification. However other potential tenderers could not follow through on their initial promises for a fully wireless or powerline façade system and Ligman were subsequently asked to add this to their submission.

Around the same time, the coincidence happened of Martin Valentine joining Ligman as Global Design Director to return to Europe after leaving ADM, and this meant the lighting designer of the tender and specification was able to help collaborate in the technical solution Ligman proposed and this was a bespoke fully wireless DMX system which placed transceivers in every RGBW floodlight and several small wireless transmitters and boosters placed strategically around the exterior of the building.

Parallel to this Ligman’s Lighting Design team modelled the building in 3D, taking measurements off 1981 original paper plans, and were able to select beam angles, sizes, aiming points and pre-address every luminaire around the facades.