Date: 15/11/2008

Boston's skyscraper illuminated with white LED fixtures

Boston's first official skyscraper, the Marriott Custom House Tower has shed its old and power thirsty incandescent-based fixtures to give place for new energy efficient LED fixtures that consume less than 35% in comparison to incandescent lighting.

Lam Partners Inc, the same company that has designed earlier lighting system, conceptualized the tower's lighting scheme. The design team chose new LED-based lighting fixtures from Philips Color Kinetics that, in addition to consuming less energy, require far less maintenance with a projected lifetime of more than 20 years at six hours of use per day. An approximate total of 125 eW Blast Powercore and eW Graze Powercore fixtures now illuminate the Tower from the 17th floor to the peak, while energy-efficient metal halide fixtures from Philips Lightolier illuminate the building's base.

"We're thrilled to work on a project of this magnitude, bringing such an important building back to its rightful luminous place among the Boston skyline," said Brad Koerner, Project Designer at Lam Partners. "To achieve this kind of architectural application with white LED technology would have been unthinkable even just a year ago. Today the long life and efficiency of white LED sources will open up new possibilities for sustainable urban lighting."

New LED fixtures are mechanically and physically compatible with existing incandescent lighting fixtures. They incorporate Philips' proprietary Powercore technology to directly accept line voltage, which eliminates the need for external low-voltage power supplies and special cabling that were historically required to run LED fixtures.

Well, now its role of lighting experts to save precious energy by installing more such power saving illumination systems, and this creates new market opportunities for electronics industry.