The widespread use of LED as both lighting and moving image display during the last ten years has had profound effects on the interior design and audio-visual industries. However, a yet more significant change affecting architecture itself is only now commencing, as interconnect and power distribution technologies advance. LED enables very reliable, miniaturised light sources to be integrated with building materials, to produce displays bright enough to be prominent even in sunlight. It has taken more than five years for the first LED advertising bill-board applications to transform into products that will last for tens of years - partly because those early sources were only just bright enough, running at the limit of their specification - and partly because of considerable progress in materials and design. Overcoming these difficulties has now enabled a remarkable intersection of lighting and moving imagery, which has already overtaken theatre and live event installation.
However, the challenges of architectural-scale displays are more testing. The scale and environmental demands of implementing whole facades as display require not just reliability, but also the distribution of power and data across much greater distances with the concurrent responsibilities of limiting the visual, structural and cost impact to the building and also ensuring safety and maintainability of the installation.
Less obvious, but just as important, the scale of such displays also requires new image generation techniques, since the separation and location of picture elements - pixels - is dictated far more by the structure.
If these issues can be addressed successfully, though, a whole new visual paradigm becomes accessible. Instead of just 'playing' imagery originated for other applications on a media facade, it is possible to synthesise illumination that is neither just image nor lighting, but which modifies the perception of the structure in real time in response to the space surrounding the building. Whether related to the time of day, the weather, or activities within the building such illumination may quite well never repeat - being instead unique to complex and fugitive real time circumstances - but it nevertheless becomes a key component of the architecture. Essential to achieving such a marrying of media and architecture is the effective integration of LED with building materials and their incorporation from the outset into new building proposals.
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