Dallas' most recognizable landmark is about to shine a little brighter. Reunion Tower is undergoing its first lighting upgrade since January 1, 2012 - with crews working atop the iconic geodesic globe this week to replace all 259 LED fixtures on the 561-foot downtown structure.
Installation is taking place Thursday and Friday from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. each day. The new lights are brighter and have more bulbs than the previous lights, allowing for better color quality and white light.
The original LED fixtures each had a single 50W RGB pixel. The new lights feature an even brighter center surrounded by 32 additional smaller lights, and the diameter of each fixture is also larger. In a press release, Reunion Tower officials called it "a big moment that doesn't happen frequently."
Nine miles of wiring will be used to complete the installation — enough to stretch from downtown Dallas all the way to Love Field.
Crews are working from outside the tower's safety cage to replace the older fixtures with the newer, lighter units. Passersby near Reunion Boulevard and the Hyatt Regency Dallas this week may spot workers harnessed and suspended on the exterior of the globe during the midday installation windows.
The upgrade affects all 259 fixtures that stud the tower's outer geodesic structure. Each fixture functions like a pixel on a screen — by varying the intensity of red, green, and blue LEDs, the system produces every visible color. All fixtures are controlled by Color Kinetics hardware running computer-generated light show programs.
The lighting mechanism behind each fixture contains three separate LED lights comprised of 12 nodes, totaling 36 nodes per fixture. That's 9,324 individual lights across the full globe, capable of producing upward of 16.7 million possible color combinations.
The tower, completed in 1978 at 300 Reunion Boulevard as part of a broader downtown redevelopment project, has long served as a cultural beacon for the city — lighting up in team colors for championships, red-white-and-blue for patriotic holidays, and pink during Breast Cancer Awareness Month, among dozens of other annual occasions. The New Year's Eve countdown display, which combines the LED system with more than 5,000 pyrotechnic effects, draws crowds citywide.
With the new fixtures in place, those nightly light shows are expected to look sharper and more vivid across the Dallas skyline.
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