The museum, which opened in 1973, houses the world’s largest collection of the painter’s works. The new 800 sqm glass building between the original museum and the temporary exhibition wing accommodates the cloakroom, shops and a central atrium.

The 650 sq m of glass with which the building is constructed means that it is flooded with light during the day; so Ampco Flashlight was asked to design a lighting system which would not only be easy to operate with touchscreen panels, but would also respond to external light levels. The tender also called for the system to interface with the museum’s existing  DALI- and relay-based setup. 

“We needed to ensure that existing control panels within the museum could operate the new fixtures, via Mosaic,” explains Flashlight’s lighting sales manager, Bas van Schelven. The Desire D22 Lustr+ fixtures are used alongside hall lights to provide the main lighting, which run lighting scenes based on the seasons, with warm colours for winter, and cooler for spring. In addition, four preset scenes were created – for day, night, cleaning and special events.

“The museum specified XTI fixtures, normally used for outdoor lighting, because of their convection cooling– the brief specified that forced cooling would not be allowed,” Bas comments. In addition to the fixtures, the museum also specified an ETC Ion® control desk and fader wing in order to be able to take over the automated control provided by the Mosaic controller. 

As Bas explains: “The Ion can be used when the museum hosts special events and there is a need to manually control the lights and colors. Visiting third party DMX consoles can also take over control via DMX Input into a Net3 DMX/RDM Gateway.”