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Together with the Stuttgart architects, A&O Technology devised special specifications.
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The A&O FALCON STATIC ARC devices proved the most convincing option for this project but they had to undergo certain modifications. Fortunately the robust FALCON STATIC ARC searchlights are fully capable of withstanding such conditions having already proved their resistance to the elements and extreme conditions on numerous occasions. From the temperatures, however, which can easily reach 50 ☌ in midsummer and fall below freezing in winter, no shelter was possible. There was just enough space in the half-moon, with its 23-metre diameter, to accommodate the FALCON high-powered searchlights chosen, thereby lessening their exposure to the winds of Saudi Arabia. For this reason, a correspondingly brilliant and tightly focussed lighting installation was necessary to fully realize the effect. In short, the project is on a gigantic scale.
And there is one for each point of the compass. The largest, certainly, ever to have been mounted on a tower, each features a 43-metre-high face, hour-hands 17 metres long and minute-hands measuring 22 metres. Even the clocks are among the world’s largest. Despite Arabian style elements, the tower bears a remarkable resemble to London’s Big Ben. With its 601 metres, this is now the second highest building in the world, after the Burj Khalifa. The Stuttgart architectural bureau responsible for the project, SL Rasch, went to a great deal of trouble to select the finest lighting equipment for the task in hand and the impressive lighting installation at the top of the Makkah Clock Royal Hotel Tower is therefore the upshot of exhaustive technical discussions and sophisticated lighting demos. For none are more intimately bound to time than Muslims in Mecca.Įvery year at the time of the Hadj up to three million Muslims make a pilgrimage to the Holy City, which since this summer has seen its stock of lighting equipment lavishly enhanced. Twenty FALCON STATIC ARC white 7000 watt and twenty-eight SKY FALCON ARC white 1200 searchlights have since the beginning of Ramadan in July 2012 been showing pilgrims the way. By night, when the believers are called to prayer, the cradle of the half moon opens and gliding beams of light climb heavenwards. And in the heart of the Holy City, a giant golden crescent moon on the Makkah Clock Royal Tower in the Abraj Al-Bait complex dominates the scene.
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November 2012, Saudi Arabia – Ninety kilometres from the Red Sea lies the birthplace of Mohammed, the prophet of Islam: Mecca.
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