page_title: Reunion Tower
section_title: Architecture
hierarchical_section_title: Reunion Tower / Architecture
caption_attribution_description: English: A view of Reunion Tower and Hyatt Regency Dallas.
context_page_description: Reunion Tower is a 561 ft observation tower in Dallas, Texas and one of the city's most recognizable landmarks. Located at 300 Reunion Boulevard in the Reunion district of downtown Dallas, the tower is part of the Hyatt Regency Hotel complex, and is the city's 15th tallest building. A free-standing structure until the construction of an addition to the Hyatt Regency Dallas in 1998, the tower was designed by architectural firm Welton Becket & Associates.
context_section_description: The tower contains three floors with circular floor plans on top of four shafts of poured-in-place concrete. A central cylindrical shaft houses both stairs and mechanical equipment. Three rectangular shafts, featuring elevators, rise parallel to the central shaft. Each shaft's outfacing wall is made up of glass panels, providing tourists views of the city during the 68-second elevator ride to the top.  Before renovations in 2008, the first level housed the observation deck, the second a revolving restaurant called Antares, and the third level a club called The Dome. The top three floors are encased in an open-air sphere, which is a geodesic dome formed with aluminum struts. Every one of the struts' 260 intersections is covered by aluminum circles with lights in the center.
  At night, the globe at the building's top is illuminated with 259 custom LED fixtures, manufactured by Altman Lighting and Color Kinetics, a division of Philips Solid State Lighting. Wiedamark, a Dallas-based LED lighting company, led the development, installation and programming of the lights. The original lighting fixtures were conventional incandescent and every unit used 130 watts of electricity. Similarly, the new LED lighting system with all of its color and animation capabilities requires less than 1/5 of the electricity of the old system. Each point on the Reunion Tower is, in fact, using as much electricity as an average nightlight and as much 2 nightlights at its brightest setting.
  Every fixture has a collaboration of several red, green and blue (RGB) LED lights that are diffused behind a 3/4-inch thick opaque glass cover. While each fixture is very large at nearly 16 inches in diameter, they function in exactly the same way as a pixel on the screen of a cellular phone. By varying the intensity of red, green and blue, the system is able to create every visible color from pinks and purples to white. By moving these colors around the globe at a fluid rate, animations and movement are perceived. All 259 fixtures are controlled by Color Kinetics hardware to execute various computer-generated patterns and colors along the surface of the sphere. The DMX512 lighting protocol is used to communicate with the fixtures. Each fixture is manufactured from solid cast stainless steel and weighs over 20 pounds. Making the tower an iconic landmark on the Dallas skyline, lighting on the globe is also used for special events and holidays across the city (for example, the winter season will feature seasonal colors and animations; for St. Patrick's Day, it will be illuminated in green; for patriotic events, it will be lit in red, white and blue; etc.) The globe was lit up in rainbow colors on June 26, 2015 to celebrate the supreme court ruling which legalized same sex marriage.
caption: Reunion Tower rising over the Hyatt Regency Dallas.
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