It needs to be bold, monumental and provocative… a dynamic yet cohesive user experience for messaging and media. It also needs to be structurally sound without altering or damaging the existing stonework, we’ll need to take this out someday and can’t leave any marks. These were some of the requirements presented by the Met in the first meeting. They had called us in to discuss the digital signage they wanted for the lobby of the Breuer Building.
The idea was to fit a custom high-resolution LED wall into an existing niche in the lobby of the Breuer Building that would be used not only for daily information and notices about the museum but show commissioned works of digital video art. The Met had been working closely with architects from Beyer Blinder Belle so they had a vision of what they wanted it to do and what it should look like. We were presented with concept drawings in that first meeting. It was that level of professionalism that made this entire collaboration a pleasure to be a part of from start to finish.
The Breuer Building is a historic landmark. This LED wall is intended to be in place for about a decade when it does come down the original stonework needs to be as we found it on day one. So, how do you safely mount a two-thousand pound LED video wall into a niche without damaging or anchoring into the stonework?
So now what?
Our concept was to build a steel frame that would be compression mounted inside the niche. The weight would be carried by the building steel under the marble ledge of the niche. Twenty screw jacks around the perimeter of the frame would be used to level and secure the frame against all four sides of the niche. The frame would need to be nearly perfect as even an eighth of an inch of deviation would show in the finished 1.9mm LED wall. We turned to Moey, Inc. to fabricate and install the frame.
At almost thirty feet wide and six feet tall the LED wall was built from 132 Planar DirectLight 1.9mm tiles and has a resolution of 4576 pixels by 936 pixels. All of the content is custom with daily signage requirements being handled by an X2O digital signage PC which can be managed remotely from the Met’s main building. Everything is handled and scaled when necessary through a TVOne CORIOMaster video wall processor that includes 4K HDMI, HD/SDI and computer signals.
