Galleria Fashion Store – Seoul

The Building of Galleria West Shopping Centre in Seoul, Korea, is designed by Dutch architects UN Studio, has become the latest, intriguing style icon in the city and a world first for electronic facade technology. Ben van Berkel of UN Studio in association with Arup Lighting in Amsterdam have transformed the Galleria into a perpetually changing, light-reactive and computer-programmable radiant surface.

4330 discs, each 850mm in diameter, make up the entire facade of the mall. They can be programmed to generate up to 16M colours, showing astounding displays in every imaginable shade. At other times the building can even become a giant billboard, its pixels feeding text or images around the entire external structure.

Each disk houses its own LED luminaire. Together with Xilver Lighting, Gronsveld, the Netherlands, a system was created that is capable of producing 16 million different colors for each disk. At night, the individually lit disks respond to a computer program. “Each disk acts as a big pixel on a giant screen,” van der Heide points out. Mounted on brackets, all fixtures are lamped with four LEDs: two green, one blue and one red. Each emits a single watt. “The double green LEDs product a crisp and cool natural hue,” he says. “Typically, color-changing LEDs have a pinkish-magenta cast. The fixtures at the Galleria have an asymmetric throw that places the hot spots off-center. The disks appear to be glowing spheres,” he observes.

Cost of fabricating and constructing the steel structure was approximately $200 per square foot. This amount also includes the exterior steel supporting beams that span from one column to another to support the aluminum frame, the glass disks, LEDs and wiring. Each luminaire cost $55. The custom design and installation of the control system was $40,000.

via ddimagazine