The top half of the Independent, including its crown. Photo by James Rambin
The Independent, a recently-completed downtown Austin condo tower that’s currently the city’s tallest at 58 floors and better known to many as the “Jenga Tower,” is only a few short weeks away from switching on a long-rumored lighting system for the illumination of its crown. In fact, it turns out the actual lights were installed at the top of the building several months ago — so what’s the holdup?
A recent view of the Independent (left) at dawn, its crown unlit. Image: Jonathan Cutrer / Flickr Creative Commons
According to Ryan Fetgatter, one of the Independent project’s developers, the rooftop lighting setup is still in a programming phase. “We’re playing with angles, color temperatures, all the details we want,” he says. The developers have run tests of the system recently, so you may have spotted some brief lighting on the crown already — but the real thing, per Fetgatter, should debut on the downtown skyline in a few weeks’ time if all goes well. “It’s going to be a game-changer,” he says.
The installation of the system itself was teased by local lighting company Ion Art in an Instagram post from all the way back in September 2019, with a second post earlier this week showing more details of the hardware that will soon illuminate the crown:
If you squint at the first of the three photos in the Instagram post above, you’ll notice a white panel with radiator fins on its backside attached to the tower’s roof and angled to face the crown. That’s a high-performance LED floodlight, more specifically what appears to be a ColorBlast Powercore LED luminaire by commercial lighting tech outfit Color Kinetics — Fetgatter points out that this same product line is responsible for illuminating the crown and spire of the Empire State Building, though the Independent’s crown lighting system isn’t quite as extensive as that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzCmbO3Hnk8
When the lights are switched on, they will ordinarily illuminate the tower’s crown with a soft white hue at dusk — Fetgatter calls this an “elegant glow” — but the design of the LED system allows for a full spectrum of impressive color options, including plenty of opportunities for themed programming on holidays and other special events.
This will likely come as a relief to the petition-waving Austinites who weren’t particularly pleased with the crown’s design — you’d be surprised how much lighting can change a building’s appearance — but it’s also great news for the rest of us. Austin’s skyline, though it’s growing all the time, has less creative illumination on its towers than you might expect from a supposedly “weird” city. For one thing, the Dallas skyline’s nightly light show beats the hell out of ours, and who wants that?
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