The annual celebration of lights dates back to a religious ceremony in 1852, in which Christians lit candles in homage to the statue of the Virgin Mary on a nearby hill.
The light display with crane
The crane extended the boom and raised the chandelier every night
Paris-based lighting installer Sky Light won a public tender for the December 2006 ceremony, and immediately began to plan how to carry out its plans to illuminate a prominent regional government building, the Palais of the Prefecture of the Département du Rhône.
“We chose an idea of a chandelier to create an amazing and attractive light source located in the sky over the roofs of the city,” says Jean-Marie Leriche of Sky Light. “In our first reconnaissance during the day, we saw the sun playing in the trees and on the facade, and there were some shadows from statues on the building. So we decided to make a similar design. In standard lighting, you put a light on the ground, and light from the ground to the sky. It is impossible to do this with static lighting. To hang it like the sun it was necessary to use a crane.”
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View of the chandelier up the boom
View from the chandelier down the boom
That was not an easy job because the facade is very large, 80m long,” Leriche says. “At 40m from the crane to the centre of the architecture, we needed to raise a light truss to 56m high,” he adds.
They turned to the Lyon branch of French rental company Mediaco, which supplied a Liebherr LTM 1100.4 hundred-tonner, the only crane with the reach that was thin enough (2.8m wide) to fit through the building’s entrance gates.
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The complete chandelier assembly is raised off temporary supports
The most complicated thing was to understand what their needs were and the real concept behind the show,” says sales representative Xavier Enard, of Mediaco’s Lyon branch.
“Because the spotlight had to be right in the middle of the complex, I had to make some calculations to put the crane not too far from the centre of the building with the jib long enough to go quite high.” The crane was set up about 35m from the building.
Every afternoon during the four-day-long festival, crane driver Patrick Porte extended the crane’s five-section, 52m boom and 11m fly jib, and then lifted the 6.75m-diameter, 3t, circular lighting truss, for the start of the performance at 6pm. The truss hung from the crane on four chains and two Spanset polyester roundslings. A single tag line helped prevent the truss from twisting in the wind. After the end of the performance at midnight, the crane retracted the boom.
A tricky aspect of the project was stringing up two 63A and 125A power cables that powered the lights from a temporary Aggreko generator. They snaked their way up the crane boom, and down to the ground. Each of the five telescopic sections of the crane held a 10m loop of cable, to prevent the crane from tearing the cable as it extended. A net stretched across the middle of the truss collected the slack cable hanging from the hook as the crane raised the truss.
View of the chandelier up the boom View of the chandelier up the boom View from the chandelier down the boom View from the chandelier down the boom The light display with crane The light display with crane The light display The light display The complete chandelier assembly is raised off temporary supports The complete chandelier assembly is raised off temporary supports The crane extended the boom and raised the chandelier every night The crane extended the boom and raised the chandelier every night A rigger hangs the electrical cables on the crane with round slings A rigger hangs the electrical cables on the crane with round slings
