Customer application 28 August 2020

Inspiring Light Scenarios for a Novel Office Experience

Not only has Philips, a technology company, created a highly modern workspace with creatively themed areas at its DACH regional headquarters in Hamburg – the building is also a showpiece for innovative lighting technology. FlexROOM®, the adaptable solution for building automation from WAGO, handles all the room automation in the six-story venue, which comprises 13,500 m2 of office space.

Functional, inspiring and attractive design: Made possible by advanced information and communication technology. “Work Place Innovation” (WPI) is the concept that played a key role in the design of the new regional headquarters for Germany, Austria and Switzerland (DACH). With WPI, Philips is promoting efficient, result-oriented and flexible working methods that create more space for a better work–life balance. The results were quite positive: Open, collaborative areas surrounded by focus rooms for concentrated activities, meeting rooms and creative rooms for conferences and brainstorming sessions, as well as breakout areas for casual get-togethers, ensure a pleasant everyday atmosphere.

Philips Headquarters

  • A Journey of Discovery through Light
  • Everything Consolidated – with Only Four Types of Distribution Boxes
  • Lighting: Individual, Innovative and Sustainable

A Journey of Discovery through Light

Rainer Barth, Head of LiAS (Lighting Application Specialists and Design) at Philips, describes the newly designed work world as a “showcase for employees and customers.” “Our goal was to configure the spaces to be lively, while providing employees with a comfortable atmosphere and a completely new office environment,” he explains. Whether a maritime motif, a forest ambience or a style based on Hamburg’s nightlife district: Variety ensures a pleasant atmosphere. ECE Project Management from Hamburg, in collaboration with the engineering firm Plegge, were behind the successful realization of the 40 million euro project.
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Three years of design time were allotted to the construction project. With the opening date in October 2015 long-established, Philips worked in parallel on the development of specialized pendant lights for the building. These pendant lights combine direct and indirect illumination with accent lighting and a presence sensor. The indirect portion of the light passes through the color spectrum, from warm to natural white, during the day. This makes it possible to change the character of a room and reproduce natural light ratios in the building’s interior. Additional design features include wallwash lighting components in all rooms and hallways, which underscore the area-dependent color configuration in the various floors.

Nearly 600 sensors were installed to regulate light in the building. Controlling more than 10,000 communication-capable lighting elements is quite complex. Simultaneously, the time pressures on the project began to mount. Therefore, Philips decided to implement the room automation using WAGO’s flexROOM® System Distribution Boxes.

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Intelligent Room Automation with flexROOM®

flexROOM® is a proven, intelligent solution for the flexible automation of lighting, sun shades and individual room controls, which consist of heating and cooling. The idea behind this concept is the consistent use of standardized hardware and software, which simultaneously allows sufficient flexibility to satisfy the requirements for specific projects. For example, flexROOM® is based on the WAGO-I/O-SYSTEM 750, which, depending on the application, can be combined with the necessary components, like power supplies, switches, relays, junction boxes and rail-mount terminal blocks, as well as WINSTA® connectors, to form complete system distribution boxes.

The flexROOM® concept is based on room segments. A segment is the smallest common denominator and represents the part of a room associated with a window. Each room segment includes functions for controlling lighting, sun protection and temperature regulation. The system software runs in a decentralized manner on the individual controllers, can be accessed via any Internet browser and enables easy and quick parameterization of segments thanks to a user-friendly graphic interface.

Easier Automation with flexROOM® – the Advantages for You:

  • Simple configuration – no programming

  • Flexibly adaptation to individual application requirements

  • Secure configuration via HTTPS and SFTP

Everything Consolidated – with Only Four Types of Distribution Boxes

In order to operate all necessary functions in the Philip’s headquarters, WAGO designed four different flexROOM® Office Distribution Box variants, each of which covers 16 room segments. Around 110 distribution boxes are deployed throughout the building. In addition, there is a flexROOM® Weather Distribution Box installed on the roof, which detects and processes weather data and provides it to the office distribution boxes.

One of the project’s challenges consisted in merging the different systems within the building. Thanks to the versatile flexROOM® concept, it was possible, and easy, to design a simple solution. While the lighting is implemented using DALI, flexROOM® communicates via KNX with the room control and via SMI with the sunblind control. The individual office distribution boxes exchange data via Modbus/TCP, and communication at the management level is performed via BACnet/IP.

After the functional specification document was released in June 2015, the installations for building automation were available a mere four months later. Thanks to preparation and the advantages of flexROOM®, the project came in on schedule and according to plan.

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Lighting: Individual, Innovative and Sustainable

The lighting specialist Barth, was pleased with the outcome: “We are proud to have created a high-tech campus with modern and attractive working areas, which nurture processes and the future needs of our company.” A highlight of this is, in his opinion, is the unique lighting design that can elegantly create multiple lighting scenarios with the aid of the pendant lights. This also includes a night circuit in the office areas. “At the end of the regular workday, we can switch the indirect proportion of the pendant lights to blue.

At the same time, the innovative lighting concept is setting standards for energy efficiency and sustainability at approximately 6 W/m2. Since lighting is controlled as a function of daylight and human presence, the energy consumption actually lies at around 50 % of this value. The lights are virtually always run in a dimmed state. This saves energy and protects the lights and the environment. The lighting expert assumes that the LED modules will require almost no maintenance during their expected service life of nearly 25 years. For its high ecological standards, the building has already received the silver certification from the German Sustainable Building Council (DGNB).

By Stephan Lampe | 2016-09-20

Photography: Frank von Wieding/Philips; Fabian Schindler/vor-ort-foto.de

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