Interpreting urban screens

Anthony Auerbach

Abstract

Large-scale video screens in urban settings suggest new possibilities and challenges for city authorities and regulators, architects, advertisers and broadcasters as well as for cultural curators and producers. While this potential remains largely untested, it is clear that urban screens establish new sites for the negotiation between commercial, public and cultural interests. This paper takes a critical approach to the question of defining the role of culture in urban media, highlighting the shifts in the relations of representation mediated by video and the complexity of the urban media environment.

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Source: ARCHITECTURAL LIGHTING Magazine
Publication date: June 1, 2007

By C.C. Sullivan

Today, façade lighting design strategies seem to follow two diverging paths: One emulates the work of nature—the moon and the sun—while the other embraces the possibilities of latter-day technology. For any given project, a lighting designer tends to operate with either a “naturalist” or a “technologist” mindset, though the approaches can overlap considerably. In the best cases, each hopes to imbue the building with not merely skilled illumination, but a higher level of meaning.

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Louis M. Brill

The electronic message reader board is the town crier of the modern age. It is a simplistic, horizontal column of light bulbs or LEDs whose intermediate flashes of world watching headlines, slide effortlessly across reader board signs attached to banks and financial institutions and to the front walls of major corporate headquarters.

Times Square is where the reader board was first introduced and now contains more than a dozen reader boards from simple time and temperature signs to the grand spectaculars of ABC News and Morgan Stanley whose reader boards cover the entire front of each building. Reader boards are also prominent in just about every city and town in the United States and overseas. The message reader board format is now 75 years old. In the last several decades, it has suddenly evolved from just a stream of text as instantaneous news, to becoming an integral architectural component in decorative exterior wall facades. In some applications, message reader boards have also taken on the visual aspects of its host company’s brand identity. Therein lies a sign tale worth pursuing.

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Digital Facade

Mariana Yordanova

Urban space in increasingly dominated today by buildings with media facades consisting of large animated screens (Ill. 2). In the past, traditional billboards impaired the lighting and ventilation of the internal spaces to the rear. A new system created by the G-LEC Company, in contrast, has a coarser pixel grid and allows visual contact between indoor and outdoor space, while still ensuring adequate resolution for the images. In this way, video quality can be combined with transparency.

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