The King Mohammed V Mausoleum

Built in the 1930's, the mausoleum for King Mohammed V sits in the city of Rabat, the capital of Morocco. The city, on the Atlantic coastal plain at the mouth of the river Bou Regreg is, in its modern incarnation, a planned city of wide boulevards, spectacular public buildings and manicured gardens.

The Mausoleum is one of the city's most revered and visited tourist sites. In Islamic tradition, the sarcophagus is contained in a room below ground level. On entering the mausoleum, visitors are able to look down at the sarcophagus from a walkway at ground level. Above this there is an intricately carved wooden dome, 8 metres in diameter, its centre rising some 45 metres above the ground, and which was extensively decorated with gold-leaf paint.

This was suffering extreme levels of degradation from the heat from the many incandescent light bulbs that had been used over the years within the gold-leaf 'flowers', and the urgent contract involved the replacement of these light bulbs with cool fibre lights, each being crystal-tipped, one per flower.

Fibre optic framing heads were also developed to generate a large collimating format suitable for projecting light directly onto the outline of the sarcophagus.

The use of fibre optic lighting has provided a number of advantages at the mausoleum - not least being the greatly reduced levels of energy consumption and heat. More importantly, with fibre optic lightsources located along accessible walkways, the hazard that had been associated with changing so many light bulbs at such high and precarious locations was completely eliminated.