Shanghai's Jing'an District Completes Landscape Lighting Upgrade Project for Factory Buildings in Butterfly Bay along the Suzhou Creek

The Butterfly Bay area of Suzhou Creek in Jing'an District, Shanghai, serves as a crucial showcase of the city's waterfront nightscape. Its old factory buildings, carrying both urban industrial memory and nighttime tourism value, are a core node of the Suzhou Creek waterfront nighttime corridor.

To continuously improve the area's nighttime landscape quality, enhance the waterfront nighttime tourism system, and create a refined urban nighttime atmosphere, the Jing'an Greenery and City Appearance Management Department recently completed a special landscape lighting reconstruction and upgrade project, addressing issues such as insufficient adaptability and weak light and shadow effects in the existing nighttime lighting of the Butterfly Bay factory buildings. This upgrade project did not require additional fiscal budget, saving public funds, and was implemented entirely using existing maintenance costs, achieving a comprehensive upgrade of the building's nighttime appearance.

The factory buildings had previously undergone a complete exterior renovation and painting. The new protective coating has high light absorption and low reflectivity, resulting in significantly higher light absorption loss compared to the old walls. The existing night lighting system was adapted to the parameters of the old walls. After the optical properties of the walls were changed, the illuminance, uniformity, and layering of the lights decreased significantly, resulting in a blurry and dim lighting effect. It failed to match the overall nightscape planning standards of the area and could not fully showcase the nighttime texture and aesthetic quality of the industrial buildings, becoming a weak link in improving the area's nighttime landscape.

Compared to conventional landscape lighting renovation sites, this rooftop lighting optimization project presented several significant challenges. First, the construction site was small, adjacent to the waterfront promenade and green landscape belt, making it impossible for large high-altitude work equipment to enter and for mechanized construction to be carried out. Second, the complex structure of the factory roof, the large vertical height difference of the facade, and the limited working area made high-altitude, scattered construction at various points risky and demanding in terms of precision. Manual high-altitude work was difficult and inefficient, posing significant challenges to the entire construction process, including light removal, re-layout, and wiring optimization.

To address shortcomings in the nighttime landscape and enhance the Suzhou Creek waterfront nighttime tourism experience, the Jing'an District Greenery and Public Sanitation Management Department, in collaboration with its maintenance team, adhered to the principles of meticulous and high-quality lighting construction. They tackled challenges head-on, implementing precise measures and developing specialized high-altitude construction and lighting optimization plans.

The project employed techniques such as segmented manual high-altitude operations, precise lighting placement, and non-destructive wiring modifications. This avoided restrictions on the use of large equipment, strictly controlled the safety risks and precision of high-altitude construction, and comprehensively dismantled, reconstructed, and optimized the parameters of the existing landscape lighting system on the factory roof.

This optimization project, based on the architectural texture and overall tone of the waterfront nighttime landscape, combined with the optical characteristics of the new wall surface, recalibrated the light source parameters, optimized the lighting fixture arrangement logic, and adjusted the layers of light and shadow projection. While ensuring uniform brightness of the building facade at night and eliminating dark areas, it also considered the minimalist texture of the industrial building and the atmosphere and layering of the nighttime lighting.

The new lighting system effectively adapts to the light-absorbing properties of the renovated walls, completely solving the problems of insufficient illumination, weak light and shadow, and diminished effect of the original lighting. It accurately outlines the contours and structural lines of the factory building, allowing the texture of the industrial building to be clearly presented at night.