Located prominently within downtown Kansas City, Missouri, the historic Americana Hotel, now part of the Doubletree Hotel chain, was restored to its original beauty with the completion in 1997 of a $26 million restoration project. The newly-renovated luxury hotel boasts of 388 lavishly decorated guest rooms and 99 King suites as well as a ballroom and upscale bistro-style restaurant. The building is a 28 story high rise situated conveniently within walking distance from the Kansas City Convention Center, theatre district, and both business and financial districts.

Because of its central location and unique architecture, the hotel offered an inviting structure for lighting effects to accentuate the city’s skyline. The international style building provides a large 180 foot façade for painting with light. So that the hotel could become the backdrop for all downtown activity, intensity of color became the driving concept in the lighting scheme, according to Mark Hirshman and Bruce Yarnell of Yarnell Associates, Shawnee, KS, lighting specifiers for the Hotel.

The lighting design team created a dramatic, colorful lighting scheme that makes the hotel a recognizable cornerstone of the city. Using a color wash on the hotel’s facade, along with brilliant neon effects, the color lighting has given the Kansas City skyline a new identity that reflects the city’s style and appeal.

To properly bathe the façade in color, the Yarnellteam selected NEMA 4X2 distribution Accubeam series fixtures from Day-Brite, Tupelo, MS with 1000 watt Designer Color™ metal halide lamps from Venture Lighting International, Cleveland, Ohio. The lamps were placed on 33 foot centers along the width of the building to coincide with the Hotel’s vertical banding located on each side. The lighting design team conducted a series of test mock-ups to determine the lamp color that would create the lighting effects they were seeking. They selected Venture’s 1000 watt Designer Color aqua lamps because of the striking and unique aqua color they generated. The gentle hue of these colorful lamps blended perfectly with the night sky.

The lamps were the same type of lighting used at hotels and casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, amusement and theme parks, and for architectural lighting highlights. Designer Color lamps are available in different hues of yellow, pink, magenta, green and blue. They offer the ability to render precise colors, which are created by controlling metal halide mixtures within the arc tube. Metal halide lamps offer a wide range of lighting effects, from a warm incandescent-like amber to a crisp daylight effect and vibrant, saturated colors. These metal halide lamps allow the DoubleTree hotel to use a high performance, energy efficient light to provide the aqua hue.

In creating the smooth color wash on the hotel façade, the lighting team was confronted with unavoidable architectural constraints: the floodlights could be mounted only 15 feet away from the building due to an existing parapet.

"Even though this meant the aiming angles would be almost straight up," said Hirshman, "the short throw distances created high illuminance ratios from bottom to top. We used this to advantage by forcing eye movement upward to additional horizontal lighting elements created with neon at the building’s cap."

The rich color façade created with the aqua Designer Color lamps was further enhanced by interspersing vivid purple and aquamarine neon bands of color at the top of the building and using warmer lighting at the garage area and entrance below. The neon lights created effects that connected the hotel to other downtown buildings lit with neon, but it was the Venture MH 1000/U/ADX Designer Color light washes on the main façade that created the drama for the entire skyline.

In a short period of time, the hotel façade lit with aqua Designer Color lamps from Venture has become a familiar and famous part of the Kansas City downtown scene. In nationally-televised football games, the networks often show pictures of the hotel as a focal point of the downtown area. The unique use of color lighting has become part of the hotel’s marketing package and an important part of the Kansas City skyline. The hotel has gained prominent name recognition, increased its customer appeal, and earned the gratification of the Kansas City population and business community.

Venture’s Designer Color lamps have been used to enhance the architectural features of many buildings and sites, and they now elegantly complement the skylines of several cities across the country.