Moving on up…

March 10, 2010 at 10:56 am
Filed under Branding, Dynamic Environments, Signage, Wayfinding

© Albert Vecerka/Esto

Time moves fast in the newsrooms and offices of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and the media conglomerate’s new headquarters in midtown Manhattan needed to keep up the pace. Two years after it purchased Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, News Corp. moved out of its World Financial Center headquarters and into new midtown Manhattan offices at 1211 Avenue of the Americas.  Studios Architecture designed the 300,000-sq.-ft. space on five floors to consolidate News Corp.’s online, print, and wire services groups and integrate the latest technology.

Design360 Inc. developed a comprehensive wayfinding and signage system featuring digital media walls, signage, and branded graphics for the public spaces. The challenge, says Design360 Creative Director Jill Ayers, was to “maintain a consistent brand feeling across several types of components, from signage and static displays to digital media.”

To help create a dynamic communications-driven environment, the main corridor on each floor functions as a central gathering point, with links to cafes, socializing areas, and circulation. To unite the floors and serve as a dynamic, content-driven backdrop to the main staircase, two multi-story walls of 20mm LED panels feature ongoing direct feeds from the company’s website, stock ticker in Times Square, imagery from The Wall Street Journal magazine, weather, and current headlines.

© Albert Vecerka/Esto

Other digital elements in the space include graphic templates for digital time clocks and layouts for the editorial group’s Newswires Wall.

Jeffrey Kilmer

The system typeface, Helvetica Neue, was inspired by the Dow Jones logo. Materials and fabrication processes juxtapose references to traditional printing processes with nods to technology.  All workstation, room, and base building signage uses Richlite, a sustainable paper product, and ADA zinc panels emulate inked-magnesium printing plates. Dye-sublimated archival photography from the newsroom’s early days serve as glass screens in the central coffee bar areas. Directional signage and illuminated identification at the main reception areas were produced from custom blued steel with push-through acrylic letters. And as a break from the buzz of the newsroom, the project team collaborated on quiet hallways that showcase Pulitzers and other distinguished awards given to The Wall Street Journal and artwork from each of Barron’s weekly covers.  –P.M.K.

© Albert Vecerka/Esto

Auckland interactive

March 9, 2010 at 8:54 am
Filed under Architecture, Dynamic Environments, Interactive, Lighting

Auckland’s Ferry Building was transformed into a dynamic light canvas with “Night Lights,” a 5-day installation that invited viewers to add their hands, bodies, and mobile phones to the show. Creative agencies YesYesNo, The Church, Inside Out Productions, and Electric Canvas partnered to put on the show, sponsored by Telecom New Zealand in conjunction with its rebranding. The team projected a sequence of six scenes every hour onto the building’s five-story facade, then invited viewers to interact with the show by projecting their body movements onto the scenes. –P.M.K.

night lights from thesystemis on Vimeo.

Video walls for everyone!

February 19, 2010 at 8:35 pm
Filed under Dynamic Environments

“Video walls – a wall of monitors displaying large quantities of information at a single glance – have traditionally been the domain of air-traffic control, NASA, television stations, and big budget marketers, but no longer. Hiperwall’s high-performance, low-cost video wall system uses a software solution that is hardware agnostic (meaning it can work with any size, resolution or type of display, whether it’s LCD, plasma, CRT even rear-projection) and allows non-technical users to manage the display of video and data feeds using just a mouse.” — A.M.

History + technology = spectacle

February 19, 2010 at 2:22 pm
Filed under Architecture, Dynamic Environments

Theatre Le Grand Rex in Paris is one of the world’s great theatrical venues. Known for its starry vault, water spectacle, and the largest screen in Europe, it’s a living relic of a bygone era. Note the emphasis on living: With the help of the latest in LED technology, provided by Daktronics, Le Grand Rex has a new dynamic facade to enliven John Eberson’s Art Deco design, completed in 1932.

Daktronics created two 39-ft. high vertical LED towers that rotate season-related content on the hour, interspersed with events information. Two custom, curving horizontal LED bands, each 82 ft wide by 6 ft. high, conform to the architecture, providing a colorful, fluid ribbon across the facade. The total effect sends a clear message: “It’s Showtime!” — P.M.K.

Brain waves to produce light show of Olympic proportions

February 8, 2010 at 6:10 pm
Filed under Dynamic Environments, Human Interaction, Interactive, Lighting

“If you’re attending the Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, British Columbia this month, you’ll have the chance to transmit your brain waves across Canada. When they reach their destination, the province of Ontario, they’ll produce a custom light show on one of three prominent Ontario landmarks – presumably to the amazement of thousands of onlookers.” — A.M.

Digital surfaces: the rules and regs

January 12, 2010 at 6:38 pm
Filed under Dynamic Environments, Lighting, Signage

“Look up from your cellphone and your pixelated field of vision stretches to the skyline. Electronic signs are everywhere, from billboards to taxis, and now buildings are becoming digital canvasses. Some are festooned with digital signs, some integrate lights and media to define space and add ornamentation, some combine those approaches. But with that expanded design palette, and the theoretical discussions about the relationship between media and architecture, comes the need to parse complex legalese, since digital facades potentially fall under regulations and ordinances governing signage and lighting.” — A.M.

Augmented reality facade

January 10, 2010 at 8:47 am
Filed under Communication, Dynamic Environments, Human Interaction, Lighting, Uncategorized

“The digital production company Qosmo teamed up Terada Design Architects to create N Building, a commercial tower in tokyo that has an augmented reality façade. The two companies collaborated to design a façade using two-dimensional QR codes that can be read using a mobile phone. Users can point their device at the building and see up to date info from all the shops within. Qosmo also developed an iphone application that allows people to see comments left by users, browse shop info and even download coupons. the comments are tagged through twitter using GPS and are continuouslyupdated.” — A.M.

N Building from Alexander Reeder on Vimeo.

The digital divide

December 28, 2009 at 12:10 pm
Filed under Architecture, Dynamic Environments, Technology, Urban Planning

As the price of electronic display technologies has lowered in recent years, digital building facades have sprouted among more and more cityscapes. New technologies are driving the transformation of architecture into a communication medium and, not too far in the future, virtually all architectural surfaces will be programmable.

So what’s the problem? Many muncipalities see plenty of downsides to the dynamic media trend. Safety is the chief concern, of course. Many cities are awaiting the results of a Federal Highway Administration study on the effects on drivers who may be distracted by  digital billboards and media facades (although they may be too busy texting to look up). In Boston, a huge LED display on the WGBH headquarters building, located alongside a major highway, is limited to mostly static images and subject to annual review.  The city of El Paso, Texas, recently extended its moratorium on digital billboards pending the FHWA study.

Aesthetics are also a major concern. Scenic America campaigns against what it considers excessive signage, including digital signs. Boston is among the cities that have created districts where digital signs and architectural surfaces are allowed, but must be appropriate to the district’s character and can’t be too close to landmarks or residences. Municipal zoning boards and outdoor advertising companies continue to duke it out in cities like Los Angeles, which is embroiled in a long-running legal battle over digital facades and signage.

Other areas of concern include energy consumption, light pollution, community standards, and the relatively short shelf life of some display technologies. And content is another huge issue. As this article from Architectural Record reveals, the conversation is in its early stages. Certainly it’s a conversation that designers should be active participants in. If you haven’t already concerned yourself with ordinances in your own city, roll up your sleeves and get involved. — P.M.K.

LED tattoos

November 20, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Filed under Dynamic Environments, Lighting, Misc., Wayfinding

“New LED tattoos from the University of Pennsylvania could make the Illustrated Man real (minus the creepy stories, of course). Researchers there are developing silk and silicon implantable devices which sit under the skin like a tattoo. Already implanted into mice, these tattoos could carry LEDs, turning the wearer’s skin into a screen.” — A.M.

Haute (LED) couture

November 13, 2009 at 9:37 am
Filed under Dynamic Environments, Lighting, SEGD meetings

As you can see from the post below, the SEGD Dynamic Environments 3 event is in full swing in New York City.  Surely, somebody in the group is sporting the Galaxy Dress, which is “composed of 24,000 LEDs, each measuring two by two millimeters, attached to four layers of chiffon and forty layers of crinoline. The whole thing can be powered by a few iPod batteries for up to an hour. It’s one of the recent creations of CuteCircuit, a design firm specializing in ‘wearable technology.’” (Thanks to Neatorama for the blurb!) — A.M.