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St Canice Cathedral Kilkenny

Prize(s) Winners in Religious & Spiritual Site Lighting Design

Lighting Design/Product Company Eventco

Lead Designers Tom Rohan

Client Kilkenny County Council

Photo Credits Eventco

Completion Date Jan 2025

Project Location Kilkenny City, Ireland

Company Link View

Entry Description

The previous lighting on the building consisted of sodium floods placed at ground level flooding the building facade and spilling light into the sky.
We removed the flood lighting and replaced it with three tiers of lighting. Firstly we placed linear battens with an asymmetric beam behind the parapets at the upper and mid roof levels. This illuminates the slate roof of the cathedral. This element has color changing capacity as the client wanted to be able to mark events in the building. We used luminaries with a dedicated white to ensure correct color rendering.
Next we placed a series of 10 and 20 degree uplighters around the perimeter of the cathedral to highlight columns, windows and features. We designed a custom shroud to cover these lights made from naturally rusting Corten steel.
For the round tower we custom fabricated a housing to hold a series of beam lights that were focused at low, mid and high level.
Finally we added low level footpath lighting around the pathways to replace the way finding light lost by the floodlight removal. The whole system is controlled by a Pharos LPC and every luminaire on the building, totalling over 200, is individually controlled to give balance to levels.

Sustainability Approach

We replaced over 8000w of high pressure sodium SON lighting with energy efficient LED. Though we installed over 200 fixtures the power consumption is less than 2500 watts. All luminaries were supplied by Color Kinetics with cardboard only packaging which was recycled. Previous lighting was removed and taken to a specialist electronics recycling centre.