Lighting the Super Bowl beacon atop the SunTrust building
At the moment, it's a super beacon of light celebrating Super Bowl XLIII. We went up past the 37th floor to find out how they light the colorful pyramid on top of Tampa's SunTrust Financial Centre.
Super Bowl XLIII. We went up past the 37th floor to find out how they light the colorful pyramid on top of Tampa's SunTrust Financial Centre.
In daylight, the SunTrust Financial Centre is a sharp-looking building. The architects twisted the skyscraper diagonally, so it doesn't line up with the other office towers around it. Then they capped it with a distinctive white pyramid.
But at night, that pyramid becomes a colorful canvas and a centerpiece for a celebrating city. Bright lights can turn the pyramid -- called a "ziggurat" -- into any hue, illuminating different sections in different colors, or even creating dancing patterns set to music.
So, how's it work?
One button controls it all
Whether they're a single color or a 15-minute moving light symphony, the light shows are all programmed in advance on a computer by Chris Jones, an artist with a local company called Bay Stage Lighting.
The shows are activatedfrom a panel the size of a textbook that's tucked into a room high above the city. Each show is launched by a single button. Want Buccaneers red and pewter? Press 7. Official SuperBowl XLIII green and blue? That's 9.
For the next ten days, the building's peak will glow in green and blue, the official colors of Tampa Bay's Super Bowl. On gameday, they'll split the display and shine half Cardinals colors and half Steelers colors. When we have an NFL champion, the ziggurat will switch completely to their colors.
What gives off the glow
The secret is in hundreds of panels of LED lights. Each of the building's 322 light panels is about the size of a closed laptop computer. They're mounted all around the ziggurat and shine upward to reflect their colors off the normally white panels of the pyramid. Each of the panels can project one of 16 million colors.
Terri-lynn Mitchell, who manages the building, says the LED lights replaced a truckload of old fluorescent lights that barely worked.
"Why is it important? Because it's what the community looks for," Mitchell explained. "When you drive downtown you look at night to see, 'What colors do they have?' And it's what we're known for."
Changing lights means more green
Before the new LED lights were unveiled last month, Mitchell's team faced quite an ordeal when they wanted to change the ziggurat's colors. It took a four-person crew six hours of walking around open-air catwalks, putting different colored filters on each fluorescent bulb.
These days, colors change in milliseconds and the catwalks don't get used much anymore -- not even to change burnt-out lights. Steve Crimi, who engineered the display through his Bay area company Light Emotions Design, says the LED panels just last and last. "At normal usage, you're talking 8 to 10 years or more," he said.
And of all the colors these lights can paint, the most important is green. Mitchell says the LEDs put on their amazing shows using less than half the energy of the old fluorescent bulbs./>
