Canadian Internet Registration Authority
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 café millwork 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) — LEED Silver, BOMA BEST and Fitwel-certified, a short walk from the Westboro transit station. 4té’s brief was an adaptive reuse of the existing space: a rework, not a rebuild, so the lighting had to work with surfaces already in place.
Holding a mixed colour
Every backlit element on the two floors is Nova Flex RGBW LED tape, not a fixed-colour source. There is no CIRA-red LED. The colour is mixed channel by channel, and a mixed colour drifts — between runs, between power supplies, around a curve, through a cutout where the distance from source to face changes every few inches. So neither surface was wired as one thing. The red looks continuous. It is not. Reception is four separate runs of tape, each on its own controller, trimmed run by run until the eye cannot find the joins. The line follows the curve of the walnut header, turns the corner and reappears under the desk: one colour, three planes. Rigid extrusion does not bend that far. Tape does.
Choosing a colour, not holding one
The .ca wall is the opposite problem. It is not holding a colour; it is choosing one. Because the tape is RGBW, the letters can be any colour CIRA wants, driven from wall controls at reception and at the letters themselves. 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
While the red draws the eye, the working light is deliberately restrained. Thirty-three 3G Lighting deep-regress downlights carry the open floor, with six suspended units where the ceiling lifts and five Arancia Boop surface cylinders sitting directly on the walnut ceiling raft. None of it competes with the colour. That is the point.
The café and the tables
Thirteen A-N-D Orbit pendants — an opal globe held in a slim black loop — run the length of the café window wall, with three A-N-D Button pendants over the tables. Above the meeting-room and boardroom tables, Aaline suspended luminaires light and absorb at once: in a room of glass, concrete and hard millwork, the acoustic fixture is doing two jobs, and the second is why people can hear each other. Behind the feature pieces, recessed downlights give the .ca wall an even baseline to play against.
The light that runs itself
The working light runs itself. Occupancy sensing brings each space up as someone walks in and eases it back as the room empties, held at the right level room by room, with automatic shutoff that meets code on its own. Flux designed the Lutron control system that runs it — and in an office built around one loud red gesture, the everyday light is meant to do the opposite: work without being noticed. Most offices hang their brand on a wall. At CIRA, the brand is the light.
Design by 4té Inc.
Photography by Kevin Belanger.
