Illuminating A New Future: The Wilshire Grand
“A light show fit for Broadway,” as described by NBC4 Local News – the Wilshire Grand made its debut last Friday, June 23, and marked the beginning of its legacy with a grand exterior light show, displaying more than 16 billion colors 73 stories into the sky. The new high-rise has forever altered downtown Los Angeles’ skyline, creating a modern, skyscraper sized canvas that brings thousands of residents of the city together in awe from the Pacific Ocean to San Gabriel Mountains.
In 2011, StandardVision and AC Martin began collaboration for the integrated media design work of the Wilshire Grand. The joint team of architects, engineers, designers, and producers came together to create a groundbreaking design and spectacular custom content for the spectacular unveiling of the building in summer of 2017. LED lights adorn 73 stories of spine and sail, integrated into the construction of the skyscraper as well as the signage. The custom LED lights and proprietary media system allows for uniquely customized narrative lighting and content to be displayed upon command, ranging from investor’s logos to the inaugural spectacle’s high resolution firework displays, color accurate Olympic palette, and any static or dynamic custom art within the video spectrum.
Looking back to when the project was initially introduced eight years ago, it was next to impossible to grasp how sensational LED lighting on the exterior of a building could be. That same year, in 2009, StandardVision imagined this, and turned it into a reality. “The City of Dreams” was born in Macau, broaching the concept of multiple buildings with choreographed integrated narrative LED lighting. Over 50,000 square feet of high resolution exterior lighting span across four buildings, integrated into a single media channel that allows synchronized visual content to flow across all the structures to produce a single transformative digital canvas.
The Wilshire Grand’s debut is the beginning of a new era in construction, architecture, and citywide design. Its iconic sloped sail, inspired by Half Dome in Yosemite, creates a lyrical and poetic space in the skyline, highlighted by the integration of LED lights that can exhibit a vast scope of both animated and static design and categories. At the request of Korean Air and the Hanjin Group, the building will continue to illuminate the sky with an ongoing elegant and tasteful narrative lighting program. The building will forever reshape the skyline, pointing not only upwards to new heights, but also to the future.
Read more about the project at: LA Times, NBC, CBS, Curbed, Arch Daily, Urbanize LA