Towers, mixed-use blocks and architectural elevations across the UAE, designed, supplied and installed by our own teams.
Facade lighting in the UAE
For twelve hours a day a building is whatever the architect drew. For the other twelve it is whatever the lighting makes of it. On most buildings in this country nobody made that decision, so the elevation simply disappears and the signage is the only thing left visible.
Facade lighting is the decision to design the second appearance. It divides into three approaches that cost and look very different.
Outlining traces the edges. Continuous linear runs along corners, roof lines and balcony fronts, so the building reads as a shape before any detail does. It is the cheapest in energy and the easiest to keep clean-looking from a distance, and it is what most towers use.
Grazing and washing lights the surface itself, usually from floods or wall-mounted fittings throwing light up a facade. It shows material and texture, which suits stone and heavily modelled elevations, and it flattens anything smooth.
Element lighting picks out one repeated feature — a pier, a fin, a screen — and lets the repetition do the work. It is the most installation-heavy of the three, because it multiplies fittings, fixings and alignments, and it is the one that makes a plain building interesting.
Three things decide whether any of them survive. Access, because a facade fitting that cannot be reached will not be maintained, and a run with three dead sections looks worse than no lighting at all. Ingress protection, because a Gulf summer puts heat, humidity and windblown sand on every gasket you install. And batch matching, because a run replaced piecemeal over five years reads as a patchwork at night.
The other question worth asking early is who is going to see it, and from how far. A building read from a motorway at four hundred metres needs a different scheme from one read from the pavement opposite. Almost every mistake in facade lighting comes from designing at the wrong distance.
Several of the buildings below are high-rise, and where a tower's commission ran inside the building as well as across its elevation the work is listed on the tower projects page too.
We work across all seven emirates from a showroom in Industrial Area 7, Sharjah, with most facade work in Dubai and the northern emirates.
The work
Blue linear light on the roof frame and upper edges, broken by a single warm run down the central pier.
A symmetrical grid of piers lit one unit at a time rather than washed flat from the ground.
Curved balcony fronts on every floor, and perforated podium screens lit from behind.
A commission that was the elevation and nothing else: edges and crown, with the podium as a separate object.
Facade and minaret lighting on a working mosque. Canonical category: Mosques.
Colour-changing light on a doubly curved timber gridshell. Canonical category: Showrooms and Exhibitions.
Facade lighting
A photograph of the building at night and one in daylight is usually enough to say which of the three approaches suits it and roughly what it involves. Design, supply and installation across all seven emirates, with a 3-year warranty on the fittings we supply. Call +971 6 572 3204 or message us on WhatsApp.