Bernard Block Façade Lighting Control Project was recognized with a Lighting Control Innovation Award of Merit in the 2025 Illumination Awards held by the Illuminating Engineering Society. Lighting and control design by Proxima Lighting Solutions Corp. Photography by Arnel Sejdic.
The Lighting Control Innovation Award was created in 2011 as part of the Illuminating Engineering Society’s Illumination Awards program, which recognizes professionalism, ingenuity and originality in lighting design. The Lighting Controls Academy is proud to be a founding and longstanding sponsor of the Lighting Control Innovation Award, which recognizes projects that exemplify the effective use of lighting controls.
Commissioned in downtown Kelowna, BC in September 2024, this mixed-use complex features a 34-story residential tower, a 17-story office block, and a 6-story podium. Designed as a landmark, its facade lighting incorporates indigenous-inspired artistic elements, creating a striking public artwork visible across the city. The challenge was to provide versatile illumination for this large-scale development while preventing light trespass and pollution. A structured control hierarchy ensures operational authority—office block operators can manage the residential tower’s facade lighting, but residential operators cannot control the office block’s lighting.
The lighting system operates under two main categories: routine and special event scenarios. Routine scenarios include color-changing spotlights simulating wind-blown grass, uplights highlighting water flumes, downward wall washers rendering the rammed-earth facade, and upward wall washers enhancing the indigenous-inspired texture of the EastPodium Facade. For special events, these elements transform into themed color schemes, such as red and green for Christmas, red and pink for Valentine’s Day, and green for St. Patrick’s Day. The system was meticulously programmed via touch panels, fine-tuning RGBW power and color levels to achieve desired effects while maintaining a load factor below37% at timely scenarios.
A team of trained operators and electricians manages the system, with major event scenarios programmed remotely by the lighting team. To optimize costs and efficiency, a distributed control system (DCS) was implemented, balancing the lengths of CAT6, DMX, RGBW, and power cabling with the quantity of applied addressable drivers, dimmers, relays, and local control panels (7 PMX’s). The modular, expandable system supports multiple data communication protocols and integrates with the building management system (BMS). Equipped with an astronomical time switch and a real-time clock (RTC), it enhances reliability, minimizes energy consumption, and reduces manual intervention. This advanced lighting system ensures both functionality and sustainability while reinforcing the building’s identity.
This diagram shows the general idea of distributed DCS (7-PMXs) panels to balancing cabling length and quantities of hardware based on zoning/clustering of lights.
Seven connected DCS, overcoming the difficult level of control due to the building’s size, enable different scenarios of lighting applied to different building parts.
Here is the blueish illumination of the outer grass-shaped structures, background light, water features at the building’s southwest corner from level 1 to 6.
Here keeps the blueish illumination of the background light and water features and changes the outer grass-shaped structures from blueish to a reddish SPD.
Rammed earth wall can be rendered by downward wall washers installed at 6th-floor edge in various colors. Here is the greenish illumination example.
The indigenous-inspired texture of southeast façade can be highlighted in different scenarios, ex. Christmas with adjusted lowest power-consumption with 28% load-factor as a energy-saving measure.
A almost full-cut-off bluish illumination inspired by lake colors, blending cool-white and blue light, is controlled with baffles and special lenses to reduce light pollution.
Each grass-shaped element on the southwest façade illuminates with different green color-codes, controlled by DMX interchangeably, to create a moving pattern of breezing grasses.
A local control panel sample including dimmers, relays, logic and Ethernet modules is capable of expanding with more hardware and compatible with different data-communication protocols.
