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Lighting Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral Mexico’s largest cathedral relies on LynTec to power the LED lighting highlighting the Baroque details of the church’s historical façade THE MAIN SQUARE OF MEXICO City, known as the Zócalo or Plaza de la Constitución, has been the gathering place for people since Aztec times. Today, it is surrounded by sites and buildings that echo its historic past, including the remains of the Aztec
Templo Mayor, historical government buildings, as well as the Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral. One of the largest and oldest cathedrals in Latin America, Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral is built on soil holding a wealth of artefacts dating back to the reign of the Aztecs and the dominance of Spanish Conquistador, Hernán Cortes. Impressive in both spectacle and history, the cathedral took almost 250 years to build. Each of the façades feature reliefs and statuaries that make the building a popular draw for tourists. Two years ago, the city and the National Institute for Archeology and History (INAH) wanted to spotlight the architecture and art of the building as part of a cityscape lighting project. The goal was to create a lighting design that would allow everyone to enjoy the heritage of the building, bring a feeling of safety at night and provide colour washes during events and religious feast days and celebrations. Previously, the cathedral was lit by a combination of sodium vapour and metal halide 400W and 1,000W flood lights that had neither the ability nor the power to truly reveal the monumental architecture. Aleksandar Lalicki, principal consultant and lighting designer, won the two
separate bids for the projects to light the southern and eastern façades of the building. Finding the best lighting and power control solution, however, meant tackling many obstacles – infrastructure, historical and power – within the design. First, under the Zócalo and most of Mexico City, lie the remains of Aztec’s capital city, Tenochtitlan, buried less than 1.5–2.5m down. For this reason, nothing can be built deeper than 1.2m, which can hamper construction and electrical projects. Despite this limitation, the installation still hit a snag early on when a grave of one of the first priests to serve the cathedral in the 16th century was discovered in one of the locations. It halted the install for almost six months while the INAH excavated the site. In addition, metro lines and other wiring under the pavement further restricted the areas where wiring and lighting fixtures could run. Furthermore, lighting fixtures couldn’t be mounted on surrounding buildings or the roof of the cathedral. As a solution, the fixtures have been installed on custom-designed lamp posts around the church. However, since the distance for the light to travel was between 32m and 75m, the number of lamp posts that could be used was limited. Finally,
the city experiences frequent power fluctuations, which meant that the lighting system would need to be supported by a robust power breaker panel with built-in power protection. “With lighting, we wanted to really open visitors’ eyes to the beauty of the reliefs, statues and all the small details within the architecture,” said Lalicki. “It was very difficult due to the distances, the sheer size of the building and the budget.” For this reason, Lalicki turned to Griven LED architectural lighting. Chosen for the quality of light as well as engineering, they feature IP68 connections and seven different optics. The southern façade is lit by 114 fixtures, while the eastern façade has 47. The fixtures are mounted in pairs, two per level, each covering a specific area of the building, which Lalicki and his team defined during the project phase based on computer models. Using a mere 27kW of electrical power, Lalicki managed to illuminate the cathedral with levels around 200 lux for the main details and an average of 100 lux for the overall façades. Without an automated power control solution, fixtures that are left on will continue to draw standby power, burn up faster and be prone to lock-ups.
18 WORSHIP AVL September–October 2021
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