Canadian Internet Registration Authority

Ottawa, Ontario

CIRA, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, runs the .ca domain. Its name is a piece of punctuation — and when 4té Inc. reworked the two-floor office at 319 McRae Avenue, they put the punctuation on the wall: the letters .ca, cut through the wood-panel wall beyond the café island and lit from behind. Flux specified the lighting throughout, from the feature wall to the working floor. The floors sit inside the Westboro Connection (2015), a LEED Silver building with BOMA BEST and Fitwel ratings, a short walk from the Westboro transit station. The brief was adaptive reuse.

Holding a mixed colour

Both backlit elements, the reception desk and the .ca letters, are Nova Flex RGBW LED tape, not a fixed-colour source. No LED comes out of the box in CIRA red. The colour is mixed channel by channel, and a mixed colour drifts — between runs, between power supplies, around a curve, through a backlit cutout. So neither was wired as one thing. The red looks continuous. It is not. On site, reception was rewired as four separate runs of tape, each with its own decoder, so each run could be set separately. The line follows the curve of the wood header, turns the corner and reappears under the desk: one colour, three planes. A rigid extrusion would not have turned that corner. Tape does.

The wall that changes colour

The .ca wall is the opposite problem. It is not holding a colour; it is choosing one. Because the tape is RGBW, the wall’s own controllers can set the letters to a range of colours. The price of that freedom is that every section has to move in step, or one letter reads pink while the letter beside it reads crimson.

The quiet layer

The working light defers to the red. Thirty-three 3G Lighting deep-regress downlights carry the open floor. Eleven A-N-D Orbit pendants, etched-glass globes in slim black loops, hang through the seventh floor. Along the window wall they sit over the lounges and work tables, without becoming a second bright surface.

Felt and veneer

Over a meeting-room table, an Aaline CRS Acoustic Wing lights the table and absorbs sound at once: a suspended panel of veneer and acoustic felt with the light built into it. A felt Aaline Cone Pendant, maple veneer inside, hangs over a solo work counter.

The light that runs itself

Occupancy sensing brings a space up as someone walks in and eases it back as the room empties. Flux designed the Lutron control system behind it. In an office built around loud backlit colour, the everyday light is meant to do the opposite: work without being noticed.

Flux scope: Lighting design · Specification support · Photometric calculations · Control system design · Submittals and approvals