Dynamic Lighting for the vip.com Guangzhou Headquarters

vip.com, one of the world's most renowned e-commerce giants, is the first south-China-based e-commerce enterprise that went public in the US. Its new global headquarters, playing with changing colors of the sky, reflections from the water and the light and shadow, is located in Guangzhou’s Silicon Valley, the Pazhou Internet Innovation Cluster in Haizhu District.

Light bridging spaces

The vip.com headquarters complex consists of two separate high-rise buildings and a 10-storey plinth, connecting all three building plots of the angular site, straddling the respective roads and presenting an office landscape in horizontal layers. The function blocks however appear to be isolated from each other at night. Therefore, using light to cohere the spaces with one another becomes the goal of its façade illumination.

The deliberately plain, horizontally structured glazing facades give the complex a unified appearance. The horizontal layering of facades and the vertical rising of architecture overlap and form a diverse yet orderly pattern. The floor-to-ceiling glazing endows the office with a loose and bright ambience, embodying the corporate culture of simplicity, modernity, openness and flat management.

LED lights are installed in a horizontal direction along the facades and all are concealed in the structure grooves, creating a radiance around the architecture without exposing the hardware. The Traxon ARCHISHAPE® 2.0 Linear is the source of such radiance. With a color temperature of 5000K as the indoor lighting, it coheres the interior with the exterior, letting brightness from inside out.

Colors elevating experience

A connected LED media lighting scheme has been added to enhance the building’s commercial value and the enterprise’s corporate image. Given that the glazing enable highly limited installation space and the existing white LED Linears tolerate no interruption, the owner and lighting designer have adopted the tailor-made OSRAM Traxon LED Dot media solution. The customized LED Dot ensures easy installation with a compact profile, and accurate and vivid interpretation of colors with optimal optics, solving the two main challenges put forward by the project.

The entire lighting for the overall complex is under the management of e:cue, the control system from OSRAM Traxon. A lighting network has been built with a Lighting Control Engine 2 fx high performance server and an array of Butler PRO secondary controllers spreading across the architecture. This connected illumination not only interacts with the building’s central system, but also synchronizes with nearby buildings’ lighting and even with the city-level Pearl River theme-based light show. Its performance has been proved over and again by major events such as National Day holidays, the CPC centenary celebration etc. Already known as an improvement to the Pearl River Night Cruise, it is expected to play an indispensable part in boosting local night economy.