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LED videoscreens add new outdoor-advertising punch.
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For years, signs have appeared on building walls and roofs. More recently, vinyl wraps have scaled alpine heights as they cover building walls. Now, LED videoscreens can completely cover building façades and present kaleidoscopic images that dance across the building.
Built as part of the building's cladding, or "skin," dynamic videoscreens have given architects a new theme that enables them to "display" buildings' corporate identities on a large scope.
Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's 1982 film about androids' place in society, first depicted video-covered buildings. As the movie unfolded across its futuristic city-state, viewers could glimpse several videoscreens attached to buildings and integrated within the city's skyline.
Videoscreen cladding is a victory for both architects and advertisers. LEDs' flexibility almost pre-ordained their architectural surface application. Also, programmable light and video shows, which represent tenants on their own building façades, answer their deepest advertising needs. Even building owners benefit from additional revenue and acclaim as a tourist destination.
Currently, at least a dozen skyscrapers worldwide have embraced LED videowalls. Most video-emblazed buildings stand in Times Square. However, the phenomenon has migrated overseas to major, urban centers, mostly in Asia, but also in Europe. Image content varies. Some screens serve as billboards, but others subtly combine branding and art.
The initial investment
Video cladding first appeared in 1996 as a 10-story video wall on the NASDAQ Marketsite at the Condé Nast building. Saco Technologies Inc. (Montreal, Quebec, Canada) provided NASDAQ with its 1,000-sq.-meter, $37 million Smartvision screen.
Saco CEO Gary Nalven noted, "The NASDAQ building's LED screen has become a fantastic symbol of the financial community, in some ways replacing the Wall St. image of its Roman-column building. A day doesn't go by in Times Square where NASDAQ isn't being photographed or videoed by the international media as a backdrop for their reporters."
The NASDAQ screen solved at least one challenge – how to allow light to enter walls covered by the videoscreen so tenants could see some daylight. Previous supersized LED screens in Times Square had covered dedicated, windowless wall spaces. Window slots were built into the NASDAQ display.
It's a mesh
Cologne, Germany-based ag4 Mediatecture, an interdisciplinary group of architects, artists and industrial designers, was searching to optimally balance architecture and media. They knew the solution rested with transparent, LED videoscreens, which would cover a building façade without blocking ambient, exterior light.
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