Stage Electrics Installs at Canada Water Library in London

The new Canada Water Library in London's southeast Docklands is an impressive and striking building, with artistic ambitions that take it way beyond the standard repository of books, CDs, and IT services.

Stage Electrics was brought in by the electrical contractor, Inviron, who in turn worked for the main contractor, ISG Jackson, to create a highly flexible ground floor performance studio space, capable of hosting anything from art exhibitions through to music concerts. Added to that, the massive dock doors, which open out on to a courtyard, act as a proscenium for an audience sitting outside, with the studio forming the stage.

Built from the edge of the former Canada Dock, Southwark Council's £14m investment is an integral part of the local community and popular with commuters who flock to the café for a quick cappuccino or lunchtime sandwich. Its live arts performance operations are run by a team from the nearby Albany Theatre in Deptford.

The building's design that sees its four floors tapering upwards in an inverted pyramid, with the cultural space at ground level, presented some unusual challenges in designing containment, facilities panels and drapery. Darren Beckley, Stage Electrics divisional sales manager - installation projects, commented: "As not one of the walls is square we created a unique fan style lighting grid."

The space is well enough equipped to host a professional touring company yet is still operable by people of at all levels of technical experience from trainee upwards.

Stage Electrics supplied lighting, audio, video infrastructure, mains power distribution infrastructure, and communications systems under the technical project management of Andy Hewlett. Both the technical and physical infrastructure were designed to provide maximum flexibility: power, audio, and DMX can be routed to virtually anywhere in the venue, with a studio-wide CAT5e data network carrying DMX, ArtNet, and other data as required, with video data distribution allowing a projector to be added in future.

To make this as user-friendly as possible, Stage Electrics designed and fabricated in-house a large bespoke lighting patchbay where the dimming terminates. The center of this 1.2m square patchbay cover displays an engraved map of the lighting grid and surrounding facility panels, and in the corresponding positions around it are the actual PowerCon outlets that connect to the various positions around the venue. Further equipment includes two Martin Atomic 3000 DMX strobes and Zero 88 Chilli dimmers.

For the lighting grid, Stage Electrics chose the Qmaxz QS250W 250W wash lights, along with ETC Source 4s, Selecon Rama, Acclaim fresnels, Hui Cyc Floods, and 22 Encore PAR 64s. An Avolites Pearl Tiger desk is in control.

The audio system was designed to allow the client to use the studio in all its many different configurations. Patch panels allow speakers to be repositioned to suit the performance, while distribution of audio tie lines uses the same Cat5 infrastructure as the lighting. In conjunction with the Roland V-mixing system, the overall approach was designed to give the client a lot of infrastructure and flexibility for their money.

An RCF sound system was specified for the Cultural Space, consisting of four RCF Acustica C5215-Ws with flying frames and four Acustica S8018 18" subwoofers, plus three RCF 4PRO3002-SMA active 12" speakers for foldback, powered by two Yamaha P5000 amplifiers for the C5215s and one P7000 for the sub bass.

A fully digital Roland M400 V-mixer controls the audio system, with a pair of Roland 1608 REAC (Roland Ethernet audio communication) devices to transfer audio from the high quality mic pre-amps on stage to the mixing console. An Allen & Heath IDR8 DSP based 16x16 matrix mixer adds extra routing flexibility.

Sennheiser and Shure microphone systems, a Sennheiser assistive hearing system and Denon and Tascam playback devices complete the audio inventory.

Stage Electrics also provided a comms equipment rack that included a Cloud zone mixer amplifier, RCF Acustica speaker digital management system, Altair wireless intercom base station, and Yamaha P7000S and P5000S power amplifiers.