Property Reserve Inc. – the commercial-real-estate division of the Mormon Church – and Taubman Centers, owners of the City Creek Center, a $1.5 billion, 23-acre lifestyle center that sprawls across downtown Salt Lake City, wanted to make a splash for its eagerly anticipated March 22 grand opening. They arranged for wraps to be installed on three buildings around the City Creek property perimeter (a Marriott hotel, a Key Bank and a Zions Bank building). Ferrari Color fabricated the wraps, which comprise more than 2,000, self-adhesive panels affixed to the building windows, span approximately more than 40,000 sq. ft.
The Salt Lake City office of Struck, a multidisciplinary design firm, developed the content. Machel Devin, an account executive for the firm, said the wraps were the largest such project downtown since 2002’s Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. Working within an extremely vertical environment, with mullions, vents, outcroppings and other architectural features to avoid, Struck developed vertical visuals to accentuate the 183-ft.-tall wraps. To create visual contrast, the design team meshed white with bright colors for the text, and juxtaposed the old-school Metro font with a custom, serifed typeface for City Creek Center.
Using Struck’s original comps, Ferrari Color’s designers subjected the furnished, layered Photoshop files to strenuous image manipulation and color management.
Dan Spangenburg, the Ferrari Color CIO, said the buildings’ angles didn’t lend themselves to a standard, mesh-banner material. Also, Utah’s frosty, windy, wintertime climate could generate a tremendous wind load that would require extensive rigging – a point of contention with the buildings’ managers. Thus, they selected a 3M self-adhesive film, which provided the seamless look the client desired without disrupting the sightlines of those inside the buildings. Ferrari Color printed the materials on its Durst Rho 160R roll-to-roll, UV-cure inkjet printers. Given the project’s short duration – approximately two months – topcoats weren’t applied.
“The wraps were installed on three different buildings, which were built from different materials – steel, glass, concrete, aluminum and stone,” Spangenburg said. “Each surface required a slightly custom treatment. Several brainstorming sessions were needed to create a design and installation approach that would make each application move seamlessly.”
He continued, “Each mural required two to four days to install. For the smaller ones, installers worked on a stage lowered from the building’s roof. For the larger wraps, they rappelled down the buildings while sitting suspended in bosun’s chairs.”