NY’s Empire State Building Gets a Colorful LED Makeover

Thanks to a recent upgrade, the “World’s Most Famous Office Building” will be a showcase for the world’s most advanced LED lighting system.

The Empire State Building is one of the most iconic members of the New York City skyline. It’s always fun to see the massive building lit up with colorful lights celebrating key national milestones, social causes, and holidays. What most of us didn’t realize is that it takes a team of workers seven hours to change the light fixtures every time the building needs to display a new combination of colors.

Thanks to a new, custom LED system created by Philips Color Kinetics, however, the façade and mast of the Empire State Building will now be able to change lighting scenes in real-time, without wasting a ton of energy.

The building’s owners are working with Philips to replace the existing 400+ traditional light fixtures–old fashioned high intensity discharge bulbs—with over 1,200 state-of-the-art LED fixtures, uniquely designed for the building. Not only is the new system computerized, allowing ESB staff to customize lightings from a palette of over 16 million colors (right now, it has 10), the staff will be able to do program updates to the lights almost instantaneously.

The new lighting upgrade is part of the building’s renovation and modernization initiatives and is estimated to use just ¼ of the energy that the previous lighting systems did—reducing the energy consumption by approximately 73 percent.

Article by Beth Buczynski, appearing courtesy Crisp Green.