After dinner service, Boulder’s Rosetta Hall does a neat trick. The opulent brass and marble food hall transforms in the space of a moment into a grown-and-sexy nightclub. Two years after opening, that moment still gets a cheer from the crowd.
Our conversations with Rosetta’s owners began before the renovation of the historic downtown theater broke ground, at a time when the project’s identity was just taking shape, and when the reflected ceiling plan was still about a year off.
The request was for a system that would make an elegant statement while providing daylighting in an elevated, European-style food hall environment … but then drive the vibe as a full-on club lighting system after hours.
We knew from experience that the best way to make a large impact in a space of this size was to make a distributed system, and that the best way to make a limited budget stretch was to make a system of modular, repeated components.
With that brief, we decided on the triangle as the fundamental element of the two Platonic solids: the octahedron and the icosahedron.
With one custom triangular, 16-bit 15-node RGBW LED PCB we were able to make 20 pendant lights of aluminum and acrylic that provide circadian-adapted daylighting, and by night flex 3D, volumetric, UV-unwrapped, audio-responsive dynamic looks that consistently evoke gasps from the crowd when the dinner-to-club changeover goes down.
The process of integrating the system with the building involved extensive pre-visualization in VR, close collaboration with architecture, interior design, and MEP teams, and a detailed mounting package capable of adapting to consistently changing as-built conditions throughout the construction process.
Our system is entirely autonomous, driving not just our pendants but every lamp in the entire building, including those in the bathroom, in the lobby, and in the kitchens, making the circadian daylighting subtly seamless and the nighttime party looks completely immersive.
With all this firepower, you’d be forgiven for expecting a lot of color and flashing lights, but we brought our signature hyper-minimal approach to designing the durational, generative looks that take months to play out in full.
Our philosophy is that permanent installations should withhold their most exciting and splashy moments for the rarest of occasions, instead exhibiting subtle and nuanced behavior that invites and rewards closer inspection, hinting at a complex inner life.
_________________________ROSETTA HALL: INTERIOR STELLATION
Created by: Hard Work Party
Creative Direction, Technical Direction, Software, Animations: Noah Norman / Hard Work Party
Fabrication: Leo Zacharias / Modular Fabrications, Ltd.
LED Engineering and Manufacturing Supervision: David Crumley
Architectural Integration and Mounting Systems: Ben Gray / Grayscale Studio
Installation Dream Team: Noah Norman, Ben Gray, David Crumley, Leo Zacharias
Control Surface: Chuck Reina / Astounding Company
Genius-Level Early Software Help: Landon Thomas
Major Thanks for Rubber Ducking, Get Out Of Jail Free, and Tough Spot Solves: Elburz Sorkhabi
Some photos courtesy of: Rosetta Hall and Alexa Hamed
Built with love and TouchDesigner.
