An innovative trend in the world of lighting design are the so called “media facades”:Vienna’s Uniqa Tower, Chanel Ginza in Tokyo and the Tower of Winds in Kanagawa are great examples of this tendency. Especially the masterpiece by Toyo Ito as a pioneer application… The base concept of the media facades is combining an innovative and striking lighting design with interactivity. That means creating an urban element able to interact with surrounding environment and its inhabitants.Light installations and projections of videos aim to achieve as much attention as possible through continuous visual stimulations: in the age of communication architecture and lighting have to be communicative once again. The media facades represent a sort of “eye catchers” in urban environment and, at the same time, they are supposed to be “transparent” that is they have to be well blended with the context. Spaces are dominated by interior and exterior openness.
Tower of Winds The media façade of the Tower of Winds was created in response to its cultural context. It was only 1986, but it is still an exciting and sensitive reflection of Japanese urban life. The tower was realised by the architect Toyo Ito, a great promoter of architecture as “aesthetics of lightness”. The tower, 21 metres high, is situated near the main railway station. The old concrete structure is covered with panels of perforated aluminium and expanded metal sheets allowing to the lighting system to produce their mirror effects. In the daytime the reflecting materials enhance the simple sharp of the tower, it seems like an opaque object…During the night, on the contrary, 1280 LEDs and 12 vertical luminous rings offer a real and spectacular game of light and sound. Inside, another light system creates different light effect depending on the hours and some environment parameters: neon rings light up to approximately mark the hour; light of reflectors changes intensity and luminous flux depending on the wind’s direction and speed. Sometimes the tower totally light up producing a bright show of light: through light architecture interpret the sounds of the urban context. The Tower of Winds is a very meaningful expression of the architecture concept of Toyo Ito: he has been proposing a kind of architecture as something fixed and durable but, at the same time, it should be fictitious and temporary. The volume of the building almost disappears; thanks to the new technologies architecture becomes an interactive media...
The Uniqa Tower An other example of media facades, where light plays an important communication role: lighting helps a company to advertise its brand. The Uniqa Tower, the new headquarters of one of the Austria’s leading insurance groups represents a real landmark on the Danube Canal skyline of Vienna. 75 metres high, the outdoor structure is completely realised by LEDs: about 45.000 LEDs make the building one of the most striking facilities of the city. Conceived by architect Heinz Neumann, the tower has an elliptic sharp allowing a full overview from each individual floor on the entire Vienna. The facade is not just a lighting one but it has something special: it interprets the entire building volume as a screen, the building architecture as a panorama. Indeed, the content of LEDs is a specific designed video file that reproduces the Uniqa logo and name. These video-lighting installations transform the façade in a living building where light and words move and speak to the observer. All images are composed by pixels and they work similar to television. The Uniqa Tower is certainly a good example to underline how LEDs can work to add identity and personality to a building but we do not forget that the media facades are now especially an important tool for advertisers: they reach the primary goal of communication attracting and bringing people together to visualise certain themes and values. The lighting design of the Uniqa Tower, in particular, express connotations like openness, vitality, flexibility, orientation towards future and that is exactly what company Uniqua wants to transmit as brand.
Chanel Ginza A great Chanel flagship store in Ginza, Tokyo, designed by the American architect Peter Marino and the biggest boutique in the world: that is Chanel Ginza. The shiny black tower dominate the shopping heart of the district with its 700,000 embedded LED lights that can shift into 60 colours across the spectrum creating a huge advertising boarding: the façade become a big screen showing film images and simulating Chanel handbags’ signature tweed pattern, representing Coco Chanel since the 1920s.The LED technology appears transparent during the day whereas at night the glass turns translucent and LEDs switch on to transform the building into a large scale screen, a real attraction for passers-by. The Chanel Tower in the Ginza district of Tokyo is a true architectural integration of LED technology into a curtain wall, with a kind of lighting that embodies the mega-luxurious identity of the fashion house. The result is a shimmering skin of artistic imagery using light and spectacle to unite the building and brand. A leading, luxury and historic fashion brand expresses its value through a dynamic lighting media façade: the key concept is striking the attention with interactivity, using lighting as primary tool of communication.
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