The Kauffman Centre
USA - Home to the Kansas City Ballet, Lyric Opera of Kansas City and Kansas City Symphony, The Kauffman Centre for the Performing Arts is a cultural cornerstone delivering diverse performing arts experiences. The Kauffman Centre first opened in 2011 and was designed by Moshe Safdie. Now wanting to update their exterior lighting design to better illuminate and accentuate the classic architecture, the centre worked with Lankford Fendler + Associates who created a new lighting design using Anolis Lighting LED luminaires supplied by Premier Lighting and Controls.
“The Kauffman Centre is an key part of the community and a world-renowned cultural arts institution, so the design brief they brought to us was really quite simple,” says lighting designer Dav Bettenhausen, Lankford Fendler + Associates. “The ownership wanted to replace the old 175-watt T6 3000K ceramic metal halide fixtures with an LED colour-changing solution that could match the existing colour temperature and light distribution to keep the classic look of the original design. Architecturally speaking, the interplay of concrete and reflective metal building materials is something unique, so we needed to highlight those differences with an even and uniform lighting approach.”
In the search for the ideal fixtures to deploy in the exterior lighting design, the performance characteristics of the luminaires would be of vital importance. To ensure they could experience a true-to-form result for any luminaire brought into the project, onsite tests were performed lasting 4-6 hours per night over multiple nights.
“Since LED luminaires have different optics and functionality, we knew it would be difficult to model the color saturation,” explained Bettenhausen. “To find the best fixtures, we put out design specs and allowed Manufacturer’s Reps to bring potential lighting solutions to the building for a series of onsite tests to see which performed the best.”
The team at Premier Lighting and Controls worked with Anolis Lighting and decided on a package of Divine 72 and ArcSource 96 Integral LED luminaires.
“Knowing we would need to use the existing placements and beam angles of the previous design, we started by speaking with Anolis to find the most advantageous solution,” says Gregg Garner, Premier Lighting and Controls. “Taking a closer look at their Divine Series, we liked the saturation of light and the optics, so it hit all the marks. During our tests, the fixtures were so powerful they could actually light a building about a half-mile away, but they still offered a tight beam angle to control the light spill. Their performance was stunning, and we were ecstatic to be selected for the installation.”
“Since we were replacing the outdated fixtures, we had power but no DMX and had to route DMX to all the fixture locations for the reliability of a hard-wired solution,” continues Bettenhausen. “The control system was then run off a PC-based interface with connected functionality to allow for remote changes of colour and intensity, and all the fixtures were a one-to-one replacement in each location.”

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