Hamad International Airport Doha
Transport · Qatar
COMPLETED 2021
Nobody is in an airport by choice. Everyone is tired, carrying something, and looking for a sign. That sets three requirements before anything aesthetic is discussed. Glare has to be controlled hard, because people alternate between looking up at a board and down at a phone across a floor of polished stone that mirrors every aperture above it. Flicker has to be absent, because the entire building is under camera. And nothing can need a ladder during opening hours, because a terminal does not have any. The fittings described here cover the two areas shown rather than the terminal as a whole.
Garden Concourse
A Line That Has to Bend
The timber soffit over this concourse curves in two directions and the light lines curve with it, which rules out a modular linear fitting before the conversation starts — a rigid luminaire run along a serpentine would face every joint and read as a series of straight segments pretending to be a curve. RL-ST360 is a flexible silicone section rather than a board in an extrusion, and it holds a continuous even line around a radius without faceting, which is the entire reason this ceiling works in a photograph. RL-ST1238 is behind the illuminated fascia panels along the walkway edges, lighting them from within so a bridge soffit at height reads as a lit plane rather than a dark underside. Down in the garden, RL-BL3289 marks the paths at D108 in 400, 600 or 800mm, and RL-SP3015 uplights the palms on adjustable spikes at 15°, 24° or 38°. Both of those are catalogued for outdoor use and that is deliberate rather than incidental: an interior tropical garden is irrigated daily and runs at exterior humidity, so an indoor-rated fitting in that bed would be the wrong specification even though it is inside the building.
Departures Hall
A Polished Floor Shows You Everything
Every aperture in this ceiling appears twice — once overhead and once in the terrazzo — so a downlight that shows its source does it to the passenger from both directions at once. RL-LDL1500 is a deep tube anti-glare fitting from 20W to 50W, which is the output range a ceiling at this height actually needs, and the deep tube is doing the work that matters: a passenger reading a departures board sees the lit floor and the lit ceiling, not a grid of bright holes. Two other properties on that datasheet earn their place in a terminal specifically. It is listed flicker-free to the human eye, which also means it behaves under the camera system that covers every square metre of this hall. And it is IP65, which in a building with a cleaning regime this aggressive is less about weather than about being hosed near. RL-ST1238 returns on the mezzanine fascia and the upper-level edges, the same section used in the garden concourse, so the two halves of the scheme share a driver type and a spares list. The white structural columns and the slatted timber ceiling are architecture, not luminaires.
Project specification
Planning lighting for a terminal or transport interchange?
This project sits alongside Regents LED's wider portfolio of transport, commercial and architectural lighting across the Gulf, Europe and the UK.
Enquire about your project