Dammam — a pixel for the envelope
- Location
- Dammam, Saudi Arabia
- Architecture
- Populous
- Lighting design
- Lighting Design Collective, London
- Role
- Lead Lighting Designer, Associate
- Year
- 2023–2024
- Status
- Stage 3 — spatial coordination
A luminaire drawn for this façade alone: the pixel that makes the stadium envelope a media surface, designed to be installed by the thousand, flush with the cladding, and serviced without opening the skin.
One body, three sizes
Small pixels for the lower band, seen on approach under 50 m; medium ones from 200 m onwards; large ones for the upper bands, read from as far as 500 m. The pixel body keeps the same dimensions throughout, so one product family covers the whole envelope.
Flush under a magnetic cover
The pixel sits in a countersunk hole of about 180 mm punched in the cladding panel, fixed by M6 captive screws and magnetic discs, and closes flush under a magnetic cover plate finished like the façade, with a hairline shadow gap and a gasket for installation tolerance.
An installation sequence
Countersunk hole by the panel maker, pixel body, fixings, magnetic cover, flush finish. Power and data enter through glands at the back, on cable trays mounted to the sandwich-panel frames, with strain relief by the luminaire maker.
- Architecture — Populous, for Saudi Aramco
- Specialist lighting — Lighting Design Collective (LDC), London; Stage 3 report, 2023
- Façade cladding panelisation — Maffeis