Illuminate Facades
Detail a façade in light.
Pick out selected architectural detail, mask light to a surface’s exact geometry, interpret heritage sensitively, or give a building a dynamic identity after dark. Rosco projection, masking and colour tools let you light the architecture — not just wash it.
When a floodlight is too blunt an instrument
Flooding a façade is easy — and usually wrong. It flattens the detail that makes the building worth lighting, spills into the sky and neighbours, and reads as security lighting rather than design. A considered façade scheme does the opposite: it selects, shapes and restrains.
Rosco’s architectural toolkit makes that possible. Framing projectors and custom gobos pick out cornices, tracery and arches and mask light precisely to a surface’s outline. Beam-shaping optics graze piers and fins. Permacolor dichroic glass gives a lasting colour identity. Together they let you compose a façade in light.
The result respects the architecture and the night sky — detail where you want it, darkness where you don’t.
Select, shape, colour
Select the detail
Framing projectors and gobos light chosen elements — a cornice, a window order, a relief — instead of blasting the whole wall.
Mask to the geometry
Shape and mask light to a surface’s exact outline, keeping spill off the sky and neighbouring surfaces — dark-sky friendly by design.
Give it identity
Permacolor dichroic colour and, where wanted, projected pattern give a building a distinct, lasting presence after dark.
A Gothic façade, precisely picked out
At Plaza del Conde in Ciudad Rodrigo, six Image Spots with custom gobos detail a Gothic-Plateresque palace — lighting the cornice, tracery and arched bays rather than the flat wall between them.
The scheme is warm, restrained and respectful of the dark sky, mounted discreetly on a building across the square. It reads as architecture revealed, not architecture floodlit.
What to resolve early
Façade schemes reward planning and testing. CFATS can help mock up the effect before it’s specified and installed.
The design starts with which details to light and which to leave dark. We help translate that intent into fixtures and gobos.
Façade fixtures often mount across a street or on the building itself; positions, throws and concealment need early resolution.
Masking and shaping keep light on the surface and off the sky. We plan for glare, spill and neighbour impact.
For lasting colour identity, Permacolor dichroic glass avoids the fade and maintenance of gels. We confirm hue and fit.
Related tools and intents
Lighting a building’s exterior?
Share the façade and what you want to reveal, and we’ll help compose the scheme, mock it up, and specify it for supply in Australia.