Public Buildings and Spaces
Acoustic Consultant, Audiovisual Consultant, Lighting Designer
2025 · Jakarta, ID
The scope covered Jakarta Cathedral's Neo-Gothic facade and twin towers, the nave and sanctuary interior, and the two outdoor congregation plazas — Plaza Maria and Plaza Sumpah Pemuda — added since 2018 to handle overflow crowds at Sunday and special-occasion Mass. ALTA Integra was engaged as lighting designer for the wider Saint Mary Cathedral restoration project, work timed in part to the "Terowongan Silaturahmi" underpass connecting the cathedral to Istiqlal Mosque, with the brief later growing to include acoustics and audiovisual for the plazas and the nave itself. On the facade, fixtures went in without drilling into the historic masonry — mounting positions, cabling routes, and thermal clearances were all worked out to avoid heat buildup near sensitive material, and the finished scheme can shift color for different points in the liturgical calendar (warm white for daily worship, gold and amber for feast days, purple for Advent and Lent, green for Ordinary Time) without tipping into spectacle. Inside, a baseline audit measured just 44 lux at pew level under the old fixtures, with glare from exposed point sources competing with the architecture instead of revealing it. The redesign replaced that with grazing and wall-washing along the columns, arches, and timber vaulted ceiling, layered ambient, accent, and task lighting, and a wireless Casambi control system that avoided pulling new control cable — commissioned across eight liturgical scenarios from regular Mass to contemplative adoration. Ahead of Pope Francis's September 2024 visit, mock-ups measured against the existing installation quantified the difference: 736 lux vs. 389 lux, CRI 90 vs. 82, and flicker cut from 14.31% to 7.44% — gains that show up directly in facial legibility for the celebrant and in color rendering on the cathedral's murals, including the Via Crucis series by Theo Molkenboer. The towers were lit to double as a signal in a taller, noisier city — a modern stand-in for a bell tone that no longer carries over traffic and surrounding buildings. The two exterior plazas run on Bose audio, Datascript video, and iGuzzini and WE-EF lighting, specified to the same standard as the sanctuary. For the nave's acoustics, the brief was speech intelligibility in a reverberant Gothic volume — a sound system that supports the spoken word without correcting away the room's natural, ornamental reverberance. The completed facade lighting also carried the cathedral's 2020 Christmas program, "Warna Warni Nusantara," a light-and-music show pairing regional Indonesian instruments with the new facade scheme as a message of hope in a year when in-person Mass was restricted.