Elevator industry leader, TK Elevator’s motto is “Move beyond”. This slogan encapsulates the development of their new North American headquarters perfectly as this state-of-the-art innovation center and campus moves beyond conformity to break barriers. Nanolumens collaborated with the Brand Design division of Gensler Architecture to outfit both the interior and exterior of TKE’s new 420-foot-tall Innovation and Qualification Center (IQC), with digital canvases befitting the tallest elevator test tower in North America. After working together on other out-of-the-box projects, Nanolumens and Gensler teamed up on this project in the summer of 2019. The concept was a digital display that could be seen from the outside of the building but would not disturb those working inside. As technical experts in LED displays, Nanolumens was entrusted with evaluating the execution risk of the product design and mitigating the design as necessary, which is a service that Nanolumens provides for all custom projects. R&D at Nanolumens continues to be very “ungated” with very few barriers from concept to reality, to bring a product to market.
The TK Elevator project features an 11,000 sq ft CLRVU™ LED mesh display on the interior of the building right behind the glass, as well as a four-sided “virtual elevator”, state-of-the-art elevator test tower, and digital showroom inside the Innovation and Qualification Center (IQC). More than 900 employees will work in the three-building complex at The Battery to welcome customers, students, and the community.
The Challenge & Solutions
They say, “content is king”, but in this case brightness was determined early on to be the defining factor for selecting an LED mesh display, which led the client to Nanolumens’ new CLRVU mesh product. The brilliant exterior display shows bright during the day and at night with 110-ft of LED Mesh wrapping three sides of the building and is 110-ft high covering eight (8) floors of the building. Nanolumens’ CLRVU Mesh allows IQC visitors to have unobstructed views of the city through the mesh, while allowing for dynamic media to be displayed on the exterior of the building. Nanolumens’ CLRVU display, with 2.4-million-pixel virtual resolution, illuminates The Battery Atlanta with the TKE logo, brand messaging and animations.
During the project’s concept design phase, Nanolumens’ Special Projects Group (SPG), made several modifications so that the mesh control boxes, and cable runs would become part of the architecture and would not be visible to others. Traditionally each section of mesh has 20 LED bars with power and data running through it. The team reconstructed the CLRVU display to sister up with the window mullions and hide the power distribution alongside the bars to be more aesthetically pleasing.
The control panel configuration was also updated to keep everything local in terms of power and data and thus futureproofing the display in the event of an outage. This makes it easy for the user to troubleshoot at one location without having to work back and forth on any number of control boxes. Nanolumens believes that being deeply involved in the development process early in a project allows for the display to work with the architecture and adapt to technical changes as needed.
The Results:
The Nanolumens’ digital canvas is the largest LED display on any building in the US. The project not only brought a prominent new fixture to the Atlanta skyline, but it also brought about a new product line for Nanolumens. The SPG defined the degrees of freedom needed around the new CLRVU LED Series and product development moved beyond tradition. For this project, a unique building architectural design led to the development of an inventive way to display a brand, which spurred a product design to suit a specific space and need. This innovative eight-story digital canvas lights up Atlanta’s tallest tower and its skyline for all to see.
