Printworks is located within a 150-year-old listed building in Manchester’s central retail district and is considered a landmark of the city; with hundreds of visitors moving through it every day on the commute or to experience its’ expansive entertainment and leisure offering of restaurants, bars, cinema, and health club. Undergoing a £21m redevelopment, the internal spaces and exterior facades were re-imagined with the key aim of a holistic aesthetic and the refurbishment saw the installation of Europe’s largest digital ceiling screen, a 1,000sqm installation that transforms the space.
The key principle for the lighting design of both the external facades and internal ‘streets’ was to respect and resonate with the architecture; with luminaires integrating with the building elements as opposed to dominating the forms and material finishes.
The internal ‘street’ scape leads visitors to a central ‘Pumpyard’ via 3 main entrance points and the gateways were framed with custom goal-post light boxes to draw focus and assist with wayfinding. Visitors are guided along the streets via low-level wall luminaires, providing pockets of warm light to the edge of the route. Overhead, an integrated lighting solution has been carefully considered with discreet lines of track edging every part of the digital ceiling screen. Inset luminaires with precision optics graze the walls and RGBW sections, together with architectural projectors have been synchronized with the screen content for a dynamic and immersive visual experience. Lightboxes provide a further layer of illumination to the main thoroughfare and frame the 16m high artwork installation to the central ‘clocktower’.
The lighting of the historic building façade took an architectural approach at high-level, with soft illumination of the window reveals and decorative cornicing. At street-level, bespoke wall luminaires blend with the façade by day and create a striking effect at night. Their design takes inspiration from the building’s history as a newspaper printing house (187301985); mimicking the form of traditional printing blocks with etched frosted diffusers for a more human-scale experience.
