Philips Lighting’s LEDs will support the Montparnasse Tower in Paris, France to embrace the first night of spring 2012.

The Montparnasse Tower will be lit up every night, using different lighting scenarios which will change with the seasons. Scenography is part of a temporal rhythm: On behalf of the co-owners of the Tour Maine Montparnasse, the lighting designer, Régis Clouzet has thus imagined 4 scenarios of light - one per season - based on various lighting effects, multiple scattering rhythms and a wide range of colours.

The installed illuminating structure is composed of 972 Philips dynamic LED battens and 58 LED spotlights on all floors, with the latter ensuringvisibility from a distance.

Each batten is composed of 40 light pixels. Each of the scenarios is a harmonious arbitration of the present 40,000 pixels. The selected ighting technology allows light to work point by point, "to the pixel", as it is in video. Each "RGB" pixel is one of the three primary colours of light (red, green, blue); their association thus provides an infinite palette of shades from white to frank colours.

To coordinate each scenario, very powerful computer tools have been utilized. An optical fiber Ethernet network was deployed throughout the tower for interacting on each pixel instantly and at the same time.

A control system connected to a very high speed network (Gigabit/s) allows the coordination with a video System Manager. The latter allows the mapping of the installation and use of a single media server with a DVI input (Media Server provided by Axente, a Philips partner).

The installed Ethernet network was designed to support new extensions; the tower lighting and its control are open in the future to new developments which can be easily implemented.

Citéos, of Vinci Energies Group, a Philips partner company, completed the installation of light fixtures. The installation of this new lighting has taken 8 months of night work, between August 2011 and February 2012.

With Philips LED lighting, the energy consumption is reduced by more than 90% compared to the previous installation, going from 272 kWh to less than 25 kWh. Energy used for all of the 56 floors of this tower that is 210 metres in height is the equivalent to the power used in 10 irons. In addition, the cost of maintenance of the tower is almost zero: LED technology minimizes changes in lamps, since the products used have a lifetime of 50,000 hours.

Nowadays, thanks to this new lighting, the tower becomes a major visual landmark of the Parisian night sky.