Media Fa

Media facades have blossomed in many directions, with great promise to LED-sign manufacturers, sign integrators, architects, media planners and urban developers, who recognize how this supersized signage enhances the urban landscape. Bottom line, signage has media facades covered.

“The integration of media facades in a building structure is transforming how architecture creates buildings,” said Tom Powley, president of GKD-USA, a Cambridge, MD branch of the Düren, Germany-based manufacturer of Mediamesh®, a metallic woven fabric with an embedded, LED video display that covers building facades. GKD collaborates with Cologne, Germany-based ag4, which invented Mediamesh, in providing media-façade architectural solutions for various applications.

Powley said, “The creation of a media facade on a building allows the building to come alive with imaging and lighting, which changes how it relates to its surrounding cityscape. This is a development of corporate branding and corporate-identity programs, creating its highest and most visible presence. This, in effect, is a new era for corporate displays.”

Media facades’ display screens allow corporations to communicate their identities in public spaces. Two recent ag4 projects highlighted in the article (see pages 91 and 94) demonstrate “mediatecture” designs and the structural integration that links the media facade into its surrounding cityscape.

Successful media façades match the building project with the appropriate LED media-facade display to cover the building. Building height and shape no longer restrict LED-videoscreen placement. Equally important, a media-facade plan should cover content creation and management. Time for community relations is also allocated on media facades.

ST takes a worldwide look at recently built media facades, including the Faberge Egg in Macau, China; the Khalifa Sports Stadium in Doha, Qatar; and the Miracle Mile Shops in Las Vegas.

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With such a groundswell of media-façade interest, sign companies should anticipate soon managing digital-building covers in their own communities.

The Faberge Egg

Macau, China has become the Asian Las Vegas by adding layers of electronic-digital-sign glitz to brighten its building coverage. The Grand Lisboa hotel in Macau built a companion casino, the Faberge Egg, which is shaped like an egg cut lengthwise. Like its gem-encrusted namesake, the Grand Lisboa’s distinct, awe-inspiring, LED, video facade glows as it promotes visitors’ potential good fortunes.

Designed as an illuminated lotus flower, which is the emblem of the Macau Special Administrative Region, the eight-story casino includes five floors of gaming, a sports bar, a stage with musical performances and six restaurants.

Daktronics Inc. (Brookings, SD) created the 184-ft.- (56m) high x 620-ft.- (189m) wide LED media facade with its ProPixel LED video element, which presents full-motion video for large-scale architectural applications. The ProPixel LED module conforms to any building shape as a cladding element. For the Egg, it was shaped like a hockey puck, with the individually addressable video element embedded with 20 RGB LEDs into its surface (eight red, six green and six blue), with a 140° horizontal viewing angle and a 60° vertical point of view.

A steel structural frame covers the concrete shell base and connects the ProPixel modules to the building structure. A grid of LED interconnecting brackets was mounted on the shell. Also fitted onto the grid were 12,000 triangular, colored-glass panels, whose structure was designed by architects Dennis Lau and Ng Chun Man. Filling the ovoid façade required 59,000 ProPixel units, which were inserted between the triangular glass panels.

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Special video-content “mapping” avoids distortion along the hemisphere surface. To manage the video content, Daktronics incorporated two of its Venus-7000 video controllers with an off-the-shelf Scala (Philadelphia) video-server link to two Daktronics V-link video processors.

To complement the hotel/casino complex, Daktronics also applied 2,543 ProPixel units to the marquee-entrance display for the veins of the leaf-like structures and the hotel’s channel letters, which spell out “Grand Lisboa” in English and Cantonese. Finally, it capped the hotel dome with an LED placement.

Daktronics collaborated with multimedia consultancy Shen Milsom & Wilke (NYC) to create the intelligent lighting system, which combines outdoor lighting effects with the ability to create and display custom text messages, graphics, animations and video images.

Upon completion, video imagery effortlessly glides across the Faberge Egg. In one instance, a video display transformed the Egg into a vast aquarium with koi swimming around the front of the building. In another visual, the Egg morphed into an eye that searched the grounds. At another time, the exploding Egg unveiled gold coins that wished people good luck and fortune during their casino visits.

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Other projects in the Media Facade World Tour can be viewed:

Milan's Arengario Museum

Khalifa Stadium

Miracle Mile Shops

Merck Serono Headquarters

WGBH Headquarters and the Jing Xin Building

Also, enjoy YouTube videos of various media facades around the world.

Aarhus Concert Hall media façade
ag4 and GKD Media Facades
Yonge St., Toronto Media Façade
Hong Kong Media Façade
Guangzhou Media Façade
Large-Format Projection Pani projectors in Singapore for the Chinese New Year
Guangzhou Lights – media façade
Volksbank
Department store façade
Grand Lisboa
OEG Building Media Façade Guatemala
Dynalite Luis Vuitton Opening Hong Kong
Dexia Tower in Brussels
Dexia Tower in Brussels
Dexia Tower in Brussels
Uniqa Tower, Vienna
Potsdamer Platz in Berlin
Urban Media Façade – Rosenthaler Plaz, Berlin
Chanel Osaka store
Animated building in Shanghai
Animated building in Shanghai
Chanel Tokyo
American Airlines Center Dallas Victory Park
Grand Lisboa
Grand Lisboa
Times Square Displays
Reuters NYC
Blinkenlights
Torre Agbar Barcelona
Kunsthaus Graz
Dancing Baby – KPN Tower Rotterdam
Potsdamer Platz Berlin
Light Cube Saarbruecken
Canon Building Hong Kong
Color-changing Building Hong Kong
American Airlines Center Dallas
Victory Plaza Dallas
Millennium Park Chicago
John deKron
Beijing Olympics Water Cube
Beijing Olympics Water Cube