By Katianne Williams
Troy, Michigan, a city tucked north of Detroit, has always attracted outdoor enthusiasts with its wooded trails, expansive parks, and quiet lakes and ponds. Even as natural areas have ceded to development, Troy has remained intentional about preserving green space. So, when residents asked for a place to skate and congregate throughout the long Michigan winter, the city listened. Its answer: a skating rink unlike any in the region.
The city hired OHM Advisors to serve as architect and landscape designer of the new project, its 1.75-acre site occupying one quadrant of an area that also houses municipal buildings, the city swimming pool, and tennis courts topped with removable domes. Rather than a standard rink, the team envisioned a natural scene, a peanut-shaped pond surrounded by “meandering pathways flanked by native trees and grasses,” replete with a pavilion, a concession stand, and fire pits. OHM wasted no time in turning to lighting designer Darko Banfic of Illuminart, a division of Peter Basso Associates, Inc., to oversee the lighting aspect of the project.
Banfic and his team sought inspiration from the parks nestled around the area. “Most have paths through the forest,” said Banfic. “Imagine you go through the woods and come upon a frozen pond in the moonlight. How do we light that? How do we make it usable for people who stumble upon it, but also make it attractive, so that people who see it want to come back to it and bring their families?”
In this case, what visitors stumble upon is a skating rink that also possesses amenities for all and remained close to the original vision: an organically shaped area with a small island emerging on one side, walkways that wind through trees and grasses, a wooden pavilion built with wide, honey-colored ceilings offset by darker beams, and a small concession area. Curved benches are nestled into the landscape and flank the rink’s entry where skaters sit to lace up. Fire pits—that even in the warm summer months of roller skating—are lit by a soft glow. A perforated Corten-steel wall hides the maintenance facility while playing a mesmerizing light show.
“The hardest challenge,” Banfic explained, “was there were so many parts, each with a specific purpose and a unique need, that we had to make work together as one.” In this outdoor space, how could lighting simultaneously provide safety at the drop-off, ambience at the fire pits, task lighting in the pavilion, and, on the rink, movement, excitement, and surprise? “Some of the functions of these different spaces are almost contradicting to the functions right next to them and getting them to work seamlessly was challenging,” added Banfic.
The solution included a sophisticated, layered lighting control system that illuminates each area for a specific purpose at a specific time. Each space is first lit to attract people and then illuminated to support the space as it becomes active and occupied.
First, there’s the skating rink itself, where instead of lights shining down from high poles, “all of the skating surface lighting is mounted below knee-height, along the outer perimeter within the landscape, grazing inward towards the ice,” said Banfic, who chose Insight Lighting’s RGBW adjustable spot and flood lights for the job. These lights, the smallest available at the time, are mounted to 3-in.-diameter landscape pipe with an integral junction box at the top so that all wiring connections stay dry and easily accessible.
The fixtures, protected by the deep inward curve of the rink’s railing, illuminate the skaters indirectly, with light reflecting off the surface of the ice. As the sun begins to set, the lights glow a warm white, just like “moonlight on snow-covered ice,” but when the sky grows dark, the lighting comes alive, matching the energy of the skaters with “an immersion of color.” Each fixture is individually DMX controlled, offering infinite options for colors, chases, fades, and other themes. The same lights surround the island trees and illuminate the two small bridges that link the site to an adjacent walking park.
Beside the rink sits a wooden pavilion, described by Banfic as “a warm, inviting beacon,” with separate spaces for seating, rentals, and concessions. The static-white luminaires, manufactured by ALW Lighting, are designed to highlight the architecture and enhance the atmosphere. Pendant cylinders with uplight and downlight components illuminate the seating area in a way that, Banfic described, “extracts the visual warmth of the wood ceilings while also creating desired task lighting at the tables below.” While wide-throw uplights highlight the columns and the ceiling, narrow-beam downlights, utilizing honeycomb louvers to reduce glare and concentrate brightness, amplify the height of the columns that mimic leaning trees. The mounting arms are designed with custom-cut angles to match the non-uniform angles of the columns. On the outer perimeter, only the downlight component is used, thus showing off the columns to the main vehicular traffic while also illuminating the sidewalk for safety.
Alongside the rink, an 8-ft-tall screen wall conceals the maintenance shed. This wall, constructed of perforated Corten steel and stretching more than 20 ft long, is built in sections, with wave patterns cut into the steel, each backlit by a 4-ft static, white-light fixture mounted from either top or bottom. This feature is serves as a conversation piece, a soft and mesmerizing light show designed to catch the eye but not to distract. Controlled by DMX, the lighting waves “flow left to right, right to left, at different speed rates and different dim levels to create an almost three-dimensional feel of movement of that perforated Corten metal,” said Banfic.
The static-white lights that highlight the landscaping support walking activities throughout the site. Manufactured by WAC Lighting, these low-voltage fixtures feature adjustable optics and built-in individual dimmers and were selected for their ability to easily adjust to the natural changes of the trees they highlight. As the landscaping matures, Banfic explained, the city will be able to respond to and support tree growth by “shifting lights, adjusting the beam spread, modifying beam intensity based on trimming and the speed of growth of each tree.”
Seating areas are outfitted with wet-rated rope lights manufactured by LED-LINEAR Co. that graze the stone-textured construction and horizontal surfaces below, with no direct view of the light fixture. Drop-off and pick-up areas, walkway intersections, and other high-visibility zones are lit with 12-ft-tall, pedestrian post-top fixtures from the Cooper Invue Arbor Series. These dimmable round fixtures sit atop natural-looking tree-branch-inspired arms.
Throughout the park, lighting successfully “calms, excites, and draws all visitors into interest.” In one space, skaters might chase brightly colored lights around the perimeter of the rink while beside it, small groups warm themselves by the fire pits and chat in a calm, peaceful environment. When the rink closes late into the night, the high-energy provides colored lights are replaced with soft, monochromatic lighting that highlights the flora and welcomes residents to stroll the pathways.
The space offers much more than skating, though. It hosts city festivals, educational groups, special interest groups, and even the occasional city address, which is broadcast on television. With all these uses, “the city needed the ability to control lighting for a specific purpose and to do it simply and intuitively,” Banfic explained. To that end, he programmed a touchscreen with 16 labeled buttons with specific functions such as “Daytime Presentation” and “Breast Cancer Awareness Month,” among others.
The touchscreen is a component of a very sophisticated lighting control system, designed with controls manufactured by CRESTRON. “I’m using every method to control lighting,” explained Banfic. “The theatrical controls typically are DMX, and I have that for color lighting and for the dynamic lighting for the screen wall. The rest use simple dimming, both low voltage and line voltage dimming,” explained Banfic. “The control system has to do all of these and combine all of these and make it work seamlessly.”
Construction of Troy’s Ice Rink and Pavilion began in June 2023 and took one year to complete, with the pavilion grand opening in June 2024 and the debut of the rink itself in November 2024. Today, Banfic noted, the city has a unique venue that all the surrounding cities are using and visiting. “The city is cognizant of their taxpayer’s needs and desires, and they listen to their citizens,” he said. “That makes the city more appealing and desirable to do business with, and it attracts families who are looking for their new homes. Isn’t that what we all want from our cities?”
the Designer | Darko Banfic is an architectural lighting designer at Illuminart, a division of Peter Basso Associates, Inc.
the Author | Katianne Williams, co-author of the STEM guide Count Girls In, enjoys writing about innovative projects and inspirational people.