Media facade

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Coöperatie De Volharding (1930)
German headquarters of SKF in Schweinfurt (1970)
Old Ku'damm corner with Avnet screen (1990)
Blinkenlights at the teacher's house (2001)
Pong at the teacher's house (2001)
Post Tower Bonn (2002)
Kunsthaus Graz (2003)
ABC Supersign (2004)
UNIQA Tower (2005)
Park Colonnades (2005)
Dexia Tower (2006)
PSD-Bank Westfalen-Lippe (2008)
Dortmund U (2010)
Zeilgalerie (2011)
Platform hall of Chemnitz main station with installation on the media facade (2018)

A media facade is a flat, animated light installation, typically on large city business and cultural buildings, which is used for advertising, information or art.

Media facades are all facades that, in addition to the building physics and design, generate added value through media exchange, the transport of information or visual stimuli.

history

With the widespread introduction of electricity at the beginning of the 20th century , illuminated advertising experienced a heyday. Even before the First World War , light bulb panels were installed on house facades and on roofs in Berlin . As early as 1910, neon tubes and Moore lights were also used . There was an accumulation of these systems in city squares in metropolises such as Potsdamer Platz , Piccadilly Circus or Times Square , the high frequency of which was expected to provide optimal range.

In the inter-war period , in these places, as well as at press houses and train stations, traveling writing systems were used, which, in addition to advertising, presented daily short news on sometimes considerable areas. The staging of architecture with installations such as Berlin in Light also attracted public attention on the occasion of the Berliner Festwochen 1928; the concept of light architecture was coined. Architects of classical modernism , including Erich Mendelsohn and Vasily Luckhardt dealt with the integration of advertising and planning the nocturnal effect of building facades, the growing proportion of glass favored the intended effects. Even the biggest bright tower in Europe at the European House of Otto Firle and light show palaces such as the Titania Palast in this direction that the building of the Coöperatie De Volharding culminated whose facade almost entirely in glass blocks , windows and backlit Opalglasfelder was dissolved on which exchange letters were mounted . However, further development of these promising approaches was thwarted by the global economic crisis , the subsequent war economy and the blackout in the bombing war . In 1936, Oskar Nitschke created another design for a Maison de la Publicité , the facade of which already included moving image projections, but was unfortunately no longer implemented. The 10-line cell grid large screen with 10,000 incandescent lamps on about 4 m² for displaying television images , which was presented by August Karolus at the radio exhibition in the same year , was also no longer used due to the outbreak of the Second World War .

The grid facades of the post-war international style office buildings were particularly suitable for illuminated advertising using regular lighting: an example of this is the SKF high-rise in Schweinfurt . At the end of work, blue roller blinds were lowered on certain windows, which were illuminated by fluorescent tubes on the lintels and thus displayed the company logo in a size of 25x36 m. In other buildings it was possible to switch the room lighting of the offices centrally from the night porter's box; From around 1960, the company logo could also be displayed on the Phoenix-Rheinrohr AG administration building in Düsseldorf with 138 blue fluorescent tubes in the window reveals of 13 floors.

This approach was finally exhausted by the Blinkenlights project at the teacher's house , where the audience could perform their own animation sequences and - regardless of the relatively low resolution of only 8x18 "pixels" - even play the classic video game Pong .

In 1977, Spectacolor Inc., founded by George N. Stonbely, installed the first full-color, computer- controlled large advertising space at the New York Times publishing building , One Times Square , which led to a paradigm shift in that it was now possible to market airtime instead of advertising space. As a result, more than 100 such systems were installed in Times Square and elsewhere, including the Eastman Kodak Kodarama display; this was seen as a return of the advertising industry to the city centers. Since 1982, as part of a media art initiative of the Public Art Fund , the Truisms of the concept artist Jenny Holzer have been included in the ongoing advertising animations on the Spectacolor Light Board in Times Square .

In Berlin, around 1989 , Gruner & Jahr operated the short-lived Avnet screen at Ku'damm-Eck with a similar objective . Its unique selling point was its peculiar display technology.

Since the turn of the millennium, there has been a boom in media facades in Europe - due to advances in both lighting technology ( LED ) and control ( KNX , Arduino ): the spectrum ranges from media art projects to those with a focus on emphasis the architecture to advertising-oriented large-screen video displays. Corporate identity strategists and city marketing officers attribute an identity-creating effect to them.

In 2008, 19 projects were presented for the first time at the Medienfassaden-Festival Berlin ; since then the Media Architecture Institute has organized a biennial on the subject.

technology

Initially, the updating of the displayed content was limited to the manual exchange of letters. Corresponding building-integrated grid panels were used in particular for cinema advertising. Motorized transparencies were also suitable in this situation. In the case of the traveling writing systems, endless strips with embossed letters were drawn past spring contacts, which closed the circuit of the corresponding lamp by immersing them in a mercury bath as soon as they were lifted by the contour of a letter; later punched tape was also used.

The dynamic control of the systems was carried out up to the 1970s via stepping units or relay groups borrowed from switching technology . Since then, these have been replaced by computers with user interfaces of increasing convenience.

Beginning with the Sony Jumbotron , large-screen video displays have been developed since the early 1980s, which in the absence of blue-light LEDs initially consisted of modules of special cathode ray tubes , each of which could display 2 to 16 pixels. These displays had diagonals from 9 to a maximum of 35 meters with a resolution of 240 × 192 pixels. Due to the high cost, they were preferably installed in stadiums, such as the SkyDome Toronto . Since the introduction of inexpensive LED and, more recently, OLED lamps with high luminous intensity , such systems can now also be used on facades.

Recently there is also wire mesh with braided LEDs.

Tendencies

  • growing play area
  • increasing frame rate
  • falling energy consumption
  • Interactive applications
  • Standardization of protocols for building automation
  • Inexpensive availability of energy-efficient light sources
  • Open source software / hardware for the control
  • falling effort for the creation of the content

Content

Depending on the system design and technology used, media facades are suitable for

  • abstract light and color effects
  • Marquee
  • Pixel images
  • Video
  • Interactivity

The technical restrictions in terms of color, resolution and frame rate are also perceived as a distinct stylistic quality, especially if the objective of the system is more towards light art than advertising.

Executed projects

literature

  • Dietrich Neumann (ed.): Architecture of the night . Prestel, Munich 2002
  • Fabian Wurm (Ed.): Signatures of the night - The world of illuminated advertising . avedition, Stuttgart 2009

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Construction network knowledge: special form of media facades
  2. ↑ Fritz Schröter u. a .: Basics of electronic television . Springer, Berlin and Heidelberg 1956
  3. ↑ Main-Post: How the building got its neon sign, August 26, 2009
  4. ^ Messages to the Public
  5. ^ Baunetz: Medienfassaden-Festival Berlin
  6. ↑ Haver & Boecker
  7. ↑ a b Convertible City Project SPOTS light and media facade
  8. ^ The New Yorker . Issue 3/1977: Spectacolor
  9. ^ Article in the Berliner Zeitung . May 10, 2001
  10. ↑ Avnet screen (detail)
  11. ↑ Magic Monkey: Marnix
  12. ^ Art facade
  13. ↑ Fischer lighting systems
  14. ^ Arup: Galleria Fashion Store
  15. ↑ Saint Gobain PRIVA-LITE®
  16. ↑ Greenpix media wall by Simone Giostra & Partners
  17. ^ PSD Westfalen-Lippe: Media facade: architecture and technology
  18. ↑ Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger : Media facade - the designer does not understand the end
  19. ↑ Haver & Boecker: Hypercube ( digitized version )
  20. ↑ Klubhaus St. Pauli: Worldwide unique media facade
  21. ↑ detail . Issue 6/2013
  22. ↑ Benedikt Kraft: How to make lemonade from lemons In conversation with Almut Grüntuch-Ernst and Armand Grüntuch, Berlin. German construction magazine, July 14, 2016, accessed on November 5, 2018 .
  23. ↑ Matthias Zwarg: Multimedia underground - With "Pochen" a cross-genre festival is supposed to enrich the Chemnitz culture. At the beginning it digs deep into the history of bismuth. Freie Presse, November 5, 2018, accessed on November 5, 2018 .
  24. ↑ Nomination at the Media Architecture Awards 2018 in the category Animated architecture