It is the first free and permanent public garden illumination with music in Japan. It was developed as a main night sightseeing spot to increase tourists staying overnight in the city, and the tourists tripled. Our design concept is "nightfall on stonewalls." We expressed the charm of the garden that the feudal lords had enjoyed for 400 years in a 7-minute lighting program changing in seasons.
This garden is called a “stonewall museum”; visitors can enjoy a panoramic view of rare stonewalls that varies in height from 2m to 10m. The slopes were steep and the maximum digging depth including the pipes and wires was restricted to 15cm, so we had no choice but to place the lighting fixtures on the ground. We installed custom-designed lighting hoods with movable barn doors to cut the upward light, honeycomb louvers, and spread lenses according to each needs.
Respective illuminance levels of all 29 stonewalls and the overall balance in the garden were carefully designed using 186 LED wall washers (149 RGB types and 37 warm white & cool white types, all 18W.)
We created layers of light on the stonewalls using beam angle 40°×10°and 40°to express sunset sky with color bleeding just like Ukiyo-e (Japanese woodblock prints.)
After the lighting changes from “the sunset” with 2700K lighting to “the moon gazing” with 6500K lighting, 2 seasonal lighting programs are played with music performance of koto harp and shakuhachi flute. It is 7-minute long in total. We designed 2 seasonal lighting programs for each season, 8 in total.
