From concert hall to congress centre 
Multi-functional media wall implemented with EPS.LUMI profiles

Duisburg, Monday, 15:30. The Mercatorhalle is the scene of an interesting lecture on the subject of architecture. All of the eyes of the congress participants are directed, with curiosity, onto the enormous projection surface. The lecturer makes excellent use of the possibilities provided by modern presentation technology. The audience is impressed. By 19:30 in the evening, the hall is bathed in a gentle blue light and becomes a concert hall for the Duisburg Philharmonic Orchestra. PowerPoint presentations have given way to the sounds of Mendelssohn, Bartholdy and Brahms. And all eyes are once again directed towards the front of the hall.

The media wall which spent the afternoon acting as an information board for architecture, has been converted into a lighting installation. It has become part of the musical scenery. Now 20:00 comes round. The concert begins. At the first note, the four equally-sized square sections of the wall (10 x 10 metres) split into two halves. Behind it, a superlative instrument comes into view. A 16 ton organ with 4 manuals and 61 registers. "It can be divided in the middle and each half of the wall is a considerable weight of 4.8 tons" explains Markus Busche of D-ZWO architectural lighting who is the project manager responsible for the installation of the multi-functional high-tech object. With effective backlighting, this is probably the only automatic, sliding organ wall in the world, and it has 200 fluorescent tubes. An RGB lighting control unit is used to generate different colours and lighting effects.  

In order to be able to perfectly implement this demanding project, the team of architects and the D-ZWO team needed to find a particularly stable frame solution which enabled the two walls to meet very precisely.  In addition, an equally stable fabric with a high density was needed, one that was capable of being stretched in the construction without creases. The EPS.LUMI profiles used in this construction met all of these challenges perfectly, as always.

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