Reunion Tower – Dallas, Texas
As it is affectionately known by locals, “The Ball” has been a staple of the Dallas skyline since 1978. Its 259 exterior LED lights can be seen for miles, but it’s what’s on the inside that counts. From 470 feet up you’ll experience breathtaking 360-degree panoramic views a free digital photo and an indoor/outdoor observation deck that lets you see for miles in any direction. Day or night, make the iconic Reunion Tower a must-see in Dallas.
Reunion Tower is a 561 ft (171 m) observation tower in Dallas, Texas, United States, and one of the city’s most recognizable landmarks. The tower is located at 300 Reunion Boulevard in the Reunion district of downtown Dallas, which is named after the mid-nineteenth-century commune La Reunion. A free-standing structure until the construction of an addition to the Hyatt Regency Dallas and surrounding complex in 1998, the tower is the city’s 15th tallest occupiable structure. It was designed by the architectural firm Welton Becket & Associates.
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 with 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 tower’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. The new LED lighting system with all of its color and animation capabilities requires less than one-fifth of the electricity of the old system.
Every fixture has a collaboration of several 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 a screen. By varying the intensity of red, green, and blue, the system is able to create every visible color from pink and purple 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.