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Author
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Topic: ID seats / aisle lighting retrofit brainteaser
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William Hooper
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1879
From: Mobile, AL USA
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 03-03-2003 03:13 AM
A non-profit, live theater has no aisle lighting & needs it.
The theater was built in the 60s/early 1970s, obviously by a not-a-theater-architect. It has much screwy with it (for one, no aisle lights when they would have been required) but some nice features, probably by accident, not the least feature is really nice acoustics for stage shows.
The floor is poured concrete. There are 2 aisles: one center section of seats, & two outside sections. Each row of seats was assembled on a long 1x10 or 1x12 board then the board attached to the floor, probably because the folks in the past found it easier to understand that way. Miraculously, they don't wobble, but the hilarious day will someday come when one end gives way & a whole row of patrons will pitch back simultaneously.
The two outside seating sections have the oldest seats, obviously old cinema seats. What kind of seats were these?
They plainly had provision for aisle lights in the end standards. Does anyone have any information about the aisle lighting units' design & installation?
When I visited them, one of them was trying to talk the rest of the the theater into buying rope lights & running them down the steps. I asked what would keep folks from tripping over them as they entered the rows, & got the frozen look of terror of possible ego damage & a "we can work that out when we install them". They're rolling toward calamity.
The center section has newer seats of a different type, with no end standards. My theory is that they should stick the aisle lights on the outside sections & that will be enough. A big problem is still power: usually I've seen power for aisle lights on end standards just in conduit run straight up through the slab at the location of each end standard. It's too late for that now! I suppose conduit could be run down the side walls at baseboard level, & branched off running at the bottom of each riser behind the seats to the end standards. Making that 90 deg bend at each row going down the wall would be a monster pain, though. 15 rows.
I really don't think some of the LED tread lights would be appropriate in this application. The auditorium already has some appearance issues, & mixing space-age design & plastics as fixtures for aisle lighting into it would be awful. Something sort of incandescent, concealed or retro would be best, certainly not something modern-looking.
Can the end standard aisle lights for those seats be fairly easily fabricated & mounted?
Does anyone have any observations related to other aisle light retrofits, or ideas about how to get something in here?
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