Thomas Schielke, “Urban Branding: Media Façades and Their Luminous Tweets”

Brands strive worldwide for distinctive visual identities in the urban landscape. At night they rely onluminous messages ranging from conventionally illuminated signs and billboards up to dynamicluminous architecture for story telling. Therefore, media facades have turned into a fascinatingmedium to create an architectural image in the nocturnal city. Some brands use guerrilla lightingprojections for temporary installations to subversively transform urban spaces. Other companies equiptheir flagship stores with large LED pixel screens for high-resolution images or they consider thebuilding façade as an interface for more artistic solutions. Often video screens appear as decoratedelements competing for attention with traditional commercial billboards. Here media facades havebecome an interesting alternative to establish a more sophisticated design language for merging thedynamic content with the building. Whereas some luminous facades appear as monumentalmonologues repeating a fixed animation daily, some installations even allow people to interact with thebuilding to receive enlightening responses. Thereby, the consumer becomes part of the urbanmarketing strategy to shape a vivid and progressive brand identity.The lecture by the German architect Thomas Schielke will give an overview about media facades forurban brand communication and addresses questions like: Will the energy consumption of luminousfacades go along with the desire to introduce sustainability? To which extent do neighbours acceptobtrusive luminous content? Further, what kind of media facades will shape the future of urbanbranding with luminous tweets?
Video preview of media facades.
Thomas Schielke studied architecture at the University of Technology in Darmstadt, Germany. He hasbeen in charge of the didactic and communication division at the lighting manufacturer ERCO since2001 where he designed an extensive online guide for architectural lighting, leads lighting workshopsand publishes internationally articles on lighting design and technology. He is author of the book “LightPerspectives – between culture and technology”.Additionally, he has taught lighting design at different universities and was invited for lectures atinstitutions like MIT, Columbia GSAPP and Penn State University. His research interests focus onqualitative lighting design. Thereby, he examines in which way light could be used to interpretarchitecture and to express a semantic quality. Further, he explores the development of contemporarylight patterns, technologies and visualisation techniques to detect historical influences and to criticallydiscuss the progress of light and architecture. For more information: www.arclighting.de

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