The new Ghelamco Arena in Gent, home to football team KAA Gen, has opened in a blaze of glory, thanks to Philips Lighting.

The new stadium boasts a media facade on all four sides and an exterior architectural lighting scheme supplied by Philips Lighting.

The dynamic and flexible media facade is built from around nine kilometres (five miles) of Philips CK iColor Flex LMX – flexible strands of intense colour changing LED pixels, placed in vertical lines all around the building. The facade covers more than 10,000 sq m in total. Sixty-four Philips CK eW Graze Powercore LED strips are incorporated into the design.

All of these lighting fixtures have been pixel mapped to allow video content to be run through them, as well as onto the media facade, allowing lighting to be matched to the current video content on display, producing various colour glows and other subtle but sympathetic effects.

The lighting can also be triggered by sound inputs and there are a number of inbuilt public interactivity options.

Belgium-based Painting With Light created the lighting scheme with control solution for specialist visuals in certain areas of the new venue.

Special events and information or promotions can be graphically displayed or appear as text on the exterior of the arena and new content can be produced and programmed into the system at any time.

This feature also enables the building to stand out completely from its surroundings, with the exterior lighting elements featuring more than 500 Philips LED fixtures of various types including ColorBlasts and Graze Powercore.

The roof is outlined with 140 Philips Color Kinetics eW Graze Powercore LED strips which can dramatically change colour. The overhanging sections around the roof are coloured using 232 Philips CK ColorBlast PowerCore LED floods. At ground level, the gallery level section of the building shell is illuminated with another 220 ColorBlast PowerCores.