Shenzhen Mocape is located north of the Shenzhen Civic Centre; it is also the last major public cultural project in Shenzhen. The building is an integration of the Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Arts and the Urban Planning Exhibition Halls. Surface materials of glass, perforated plate, and stone extend and twist along the steel structure, creating a complicated architecture full of vitality. However, the unique façade form also created great difficulties in lighting design. Lighting design conquered multiple challenges and successfully inte-grated within the building, neatly and sharply presented a clear and translucent city “rock”.

BIM is a fast and effective solution for irregular shaped buildings. For this time’s lighting design process, it is also an effective attempt to use BIM to assist with lighting design. By constructing a 1:1 architectural digital model in Rhino, luminaire installation was mapped, and also calculated multiple times with lighting design software in order to analyze different photometric, power and material reflectance. In addition, in order to resolve glare issues caused by the building’s concave and convex corners, we have carried out multiple on-site tests with lumianires’ installation angels, manipulated its photometric and added shading accessories.

Considering the large quantity of lumi-naires and their installation difficulties, it was finally decided to use custom-made U-shaped shading grooves with exterior baffles adjustable in heights to block glare, and coated the groove interior matt black to reduce self-illumination. The construction and commissioning process of this project took advantage of BIM’s convenience, seamlessly integrated building and its façade, perfectly presented lu-minaire installation, load, wiring and visual effects; which also laid the foundation for future lighting design process on similar complex irregular- shaped buildings.

Design: GD-Lighting Design
Photography: He Shu