WGBH Opens New Facility

Boston’s WGBH public-broadcasting station cut the ribbon for its new home on Monday, September 17, in Brighton, MA. WGBH, which produces such series as “Nova” and “Frontline,” consolidated operations that were scattered among 12 different buildings into a site adjacent to the Massachusetts Turnpike.

NYC-based Polshek Partnership Architects capitalized on the location’s captive audience: commuters. The previous site having been hidden behind the Harvard Business School in Allston, MA, the new facility features a media façade that projects electronic-digital images. The city prohibits text displays, so images will be culled from artistic renderings and environmental elements, such as white clouds in a blue sky.

The 310,000-sq.-ft. headquarters at Market and Beacon streets encompasses an existing seven-story office building that houses support staff and two levels of TV and radio studios on the site of a former parking lot. The buildings are connected by a two-story bridge that encloses offices for staff members who generate the station’s content.

The architects met the limited $85 million budget by using corrugated metal siding and glass. Because everyone couldn’t get a window for the office space, no one got one; the offices occupy the interior space.

Mark IV (Plano, TX) provided the LED hardware and was involved from the beginning of the media façade planning. Dennis Hickey, Mark IV’s national sales manager, said, “Shortly after deciding on the formal concept for the building, specifically, the long, two-story glass connector that unites the two parts of the site, I engaged 2×4 [NYC] to help define both the technology and the form that this imaging surface would take. Exploring different messaging options, 2×4 did mockups of various patterns that integrated with the glass surface. Eventually, we decided on this accelerating pattern of slivers that resolves on the northwest corner right over the turnpike.

“After this decision, we took the project back inhouse to develop the content for the feature. Poulin + Morris [NYC] had been engaged to assist with the wayfinding graphics and other visitor experience features of the building,. And they took over the responsibility of helping us secure a specific set of vendors for the LED and coordinate this feature with the architectural plans at Polshek.

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Hickey said the programmable display can, in theory, change its image every 60th of a second, although the plan is to be quite calm, with only one image a day.

The display comprises Mark IV’s SkyTheater Outdoor LED video display, with 28mm pixel spacing, six LEDs per pixel, at a 140-degree horizontal and 90-degree vertical viewing angles, The 30 x 35-ft. display’s total resolution is 336 x 384 pixels. The operating temperature ranges from -4° to 114° F.