Galleria Centercity, Cheonan Korea’s newest shopping center, intrigues shoppers with a dynamic, fluidly changing facade. UNStudio’s (Amsterdam) director Ben van Berkel said the mall’s interior and exterior architecture reflect a “living space” where visitors shop and engage. The building’s façade is wrapped in 22,000 LED lighting points, which form a dynamic, wave-like lightshow on the building’s contoured walls. The LEDs transition smoothly between a computer-generated sequence of evolving colors and images that creates a sense of motion and constant change.
To construct the LED frame, architects built a structure that comprised triangular, asymmetrically overlaid, vertically arranged aluminum sections fitted with glass. Zumtobel Lighting GmbH (Dornbirn, Austria) designed 3.6W, RGB LED spotlights to be integrated into these sections on the façade’s outer layer. The RGB diodes are supplemented with 1.2W, white luminaires. Light from the LEDs is projected onto an inner aluminum panel, then reflected onto the surface of the building to eliminate glare, according to Zumtobel. The company says this indirect light “makes it possible to convert the tightly focused LED lighting points into large-area picture elements or pixels.”
Zumtobel collaborated with ag Licht (Bonn), a German lighting-design firm, on the project, which covers 12,600 sq. meters. Cheonan, located approximately 80 km south of Seoul, with a new high-speed train recently greeting the city.