UCLA Health Training Center

The Los Angeles Lakers – one of professional sports’ most valuable franchises – had unique requirements for its new training facility, the UCLA Health Training Center. The state-of-the art facility contains the Lakers corporate offices, physical training and care facilities, two practice courts and spaces for team meetings and game-film reviews.

Myriad of design objectives

The design team was tasked with creating a building that would showcase the iconic Lakers organization. It was critical to provide state of the art lighting controls capable of meeting the facility’s aesthetic lighting needs while remaining compliant with California’s strict and complex energy code. Aesthetically, it was important to create visual interest and drama on the building’s façade, emphasizing both UCLA and the Lakers team colors. Inside the building, the client needed studio-quality television lighting for the press conferences and interviews in cooperation with the team’s official broadcast team.

Energy code requirements

The California energy code requires that all lighting be dimmable and (where appropriate) controllable via a combination of vacancy sensors, occupancy sensors, local controls and photocells. All lighting in the building is managed by a Philips Dynalite control system. Sensors were integrated into the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems to optimize energy efficiency by adjusting air conditioning when spaces were empty. The control system can also manage the scheduling of all exterior and color effect lighting and respond to power demand reduction requests from the utility.

The code also requires control of plug loads in all office spaces with power receptacles split between constant power for computers and switched power for desk lamps and computer monitors. Operating hours for the building were 8:00 am to 8:00 pm, requiring two sets of programming for daylight hours versus nighttime hours and specific control over daylighting zones to maintain light levels. The lighting system was designed to accommodate all these standard lighting and control requirements.

Dynamic façade lighting

The central system also manages sunset to sunrise lighting control for the exterior lighting, including:

• Site lighting for parking lots
• Area lighting of walkways
• Lakers sign lighting on the roof
• Color-changing façade lighting

Individual metal panels give the branding on building exterior an embossed look, with up-lighting from 279 Color Kinetics ColorGraze luminaires. The lighting designer specified both fixed and dynamic looks. The team used the RGB values for both the UCLA and Lakers team colors as a jumping-off point to get the team colors visually correct for both looks.

The color-changing fixtures are controlled by a Color Kinetics iPlayer 3 which the Dynalite system triggers to play different shows as scheduled in the system calendar. The iPlayer enabled the creation of a series of looks for the building for both home and away games, seasonal lighting and a mix of fixed and dynamic effects. The central system triggers these shows nightly.

Broadcast-grade lighting

The interview room and press conference facility feature broadcast lighting. Both spaces have relatively low ceilings and limited power availability, meaning standard television lighting products would be too hot and too load-intensive. The lighting designer collaborated with a broadcast consultant to ultimately identify Vari-lite PL1 series luminaires as the ideal solution to this challenge. These DMX controlled fixtures were connected to the Dynalite system to provide both color and intensity control to ensure high-quality broadcast images.