Action Led Facade by Architects Langarita Navarro

The city is created in an emergency. The obligation on the one hand to upgrade the building infrastructure and secondly the need to match capacity to the other cities requires the continuous incorporation of new technologies in the public space. If at the time they were almost missing the phone booths, urban screens today are an example of this update. Once passed, the economic conditions its implementation throughout the city has done with fuzzy criteria, linked to business performance and inertia inherited from previous examples, such as Times Square in New York.

These trends have led to the non-commercial display devices are, in the process of digitalization of the city, a rare exception. Beyond the electronic information signs experiences have been scarce and always reduced to a temporary condition. This situation shows that if from private companies have found their interest in them as support for their marketing purposes there are few institutions that have found their ability to activate the public space or utility for the creation of local identity and identification with the open processes in the city.

The digital façade of the Plaza de las Letras arises from the commission by the Arts area of ​​Madrid City Council to provide the center MedialabPrado one of those non-commercial systems as a laboratory to make their research visible on art , public space and new technologies. The new facade is to become a virtual space of exchange and communication with both the visitors and with the neighbors. An infrastructure designed to support asset capable of promoting social responsibility, civic engagement, information transmission, social interaction and gaming experiences.

Action Led Facade System is a proprietary model for the realization of large format digital facades. The device consists of a regular array of RGB LED nodes implemented by aluminum cone whose section is designed to reflect the beam of light from emissive sources and improve the viewing screen. Implementation of the Action Led Facade on the party staged in the former Belgian Sawmill, future site of the center Medialab-Prado, involves the creation of a display device that occupies 144m2 consisting of approximately 35,000 nodes.

The system has a digital set of irregular geometry and easily adaptable prepared for the issuance of medium-resolution images both still and moving. By contrast, when the system is off the set of cones and nodes become activated by a vibrating surface that removes the natural light appearance of the conventional urban screens and characterize dividing.
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