A beacon of light in West Berlin

Located right next to Berlin Zoo railway station, the new Zoom office and commercial building has to hold its own among many other prominent buildings. The seven-storey building asserts its presence nonchalantly in the urban landscape, even in the shadow of the Upper West and Waldorf Astoria high-rise buildings opposite. WE-EF luminaires emphasise this architectural quality at night-time too.

For the prominent location of Zoom, Hascher Jehle Architects designed a structure with a rounded façade at the corner of Kantstraße/ Joachimsthaler Straße that contrasts as a restful element with the horizontal levels that protrude to varying degrees. The lighting concept of the Berlin lighting design office, Lichtvision, takes its cues from this dynamic design with its emphasis on the horizontal with horizontal light bands offset to one another on the upper floors. The strips of light are produced from the illumination of the window soffits in selected areas as well as from the illumination all the way around the roof crown that is set a little way back.

FLC121 projectors create the bright crown for Zoom. They are placed all around the base of the superstructure on the flat roof. The luminaires with a connected wattage of only 12 watts emit warm white light with a colour temperature of 3,000 K onto the lamella cladding. In order to achieve uniform light distribution on the surface, even though the light is emitted relatively closely, the medium beam projectors are fitted with linear spread lenses. They widen the beam angle in the horizontal plane.

ETC110 inground luminaires illuminate the window soffits. Among other features, their precise beam characteristics make them ideal for the project. The symmetric, very narrow beam, ‘sharp cut-off’ light distribution in particularly is precisely defined. Sharp edges prevent scattered light, which could disturb the people in the rooms behind the façade. The efficiency (connected load of just 2 watts) and the high-quality design (5CE corrosion protection) were further reasons for choosing the ETC110 luminaires. What's more, WE-EF was able to quickly and expertly adapt the luminaires to the special installation situation in the grating in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows.


Principal: Pondus GmbH & Co. KG c/o Hines Immobilien GmbH

Architect (design): Hascher Jehle Architecture, Berlin

Architect (execution planning): Aukett + Heese, Berlin

Light planning: Lichtvision, Berlin, www.lichtvision.com

Opened: October 2018

Photos: Frieder Blickle for WE-EF_