It all starts in the basement of the tower with our guide, Vincent Boulard, head of the building operation and maintenance department of the Department of Seine Maritime. Before opening a door, he slips us we are precisely under the cafeteria… But here the atmosphere is less festive… We are greeted by the bellows of computers running at full speed. They are equipped with software that can animate the lights of the tower. The purpose of the software is to translate » an image or a photo in « _point_s » which are actually the 648 LEDS of the tower. Any image can do, but Vincent Boulard recognizes that it often works best on geometric shapes, like flags.
“A Ukrainian flag, it took us ten minutes. The English flag, two days »
The tower is therefore equipped with 648 state-of-the-art LEDs, distributed over two sides, so 324 each… This may not seem like much given the height of the building… This is because the very structure of the building makes it possible to transform each light source into a halo. The external face being made up of small concrete cubes, an LED placed inside will be reflected on the walls and thus take on a greater dimension for the outside eye of the passer-by…
“To reconstitute the color, we use a color mixing system with a dose of red, a dose of blue, a dose of green… like on your television! »
– Milena Aellig
We climb higher in the tower, to the twenty-fourth floor thanks to a “ panoramic elevator »… Euphemism for a small red glass elevator… Capricious!
A formidable lift, when the weather is nice, when it’s not raining and when there’s no wind… at sixty kilometers an hour of wind, it stops!
We land in an archive floor: gray shelves full of boxes that form austere colors… But at the end, we open the shutters and we see the famous LEDS placed in their concrete cubes. And in the middle of the parchments, one can breathe the fresh air of Rouen.
– Milena Aellig
The advantage of this device is that it is very economical: each façade consumes 4000 Watts per hour, that is to say… The equivalent of three irons. Nothing to panic, therefore, reassures Vincent Boulard.
We go up in our glass elevator to finish our ascent of the departmental tower of the archives. Last stop: the cap that is to say the top floor of the tower. We discover a balcony that goes around… the tower. And projectors which allow to perfect the nocturnal illumination by highlighting the last floor.
The view of Rouen is really not unpleasant, especially at dusk. There is no question, however, of having an aperitif because the balcony is not open to the public for reasons of safety and wear and tear.
– Milena Aellig
Vincent Boulard here fights against the elements: wind, rain, lightning which wear out the building… And against less predictable enemies: pigeons. A real hell.
” They eat the electrical cables, they climb on all the equipment, they bite, they scratch the installations… Her favorite light? That of the English flag! He hopes to see her again one day, despite Brexit.