The Legacy Union development in Uptown Charlotte is on a mission to assert its primacy as the Queen City’s most impressive high rise development. Combining office towers and residential space alongside shopping and dining options, the 10-acre development sits adjacent to Bank of America Stadium, home of the NFL’s Carolina Panthers football team. After breaking ground in 2017, the signature building of the development, Bank of America Tower, sought a way to draw the community together into what they hoped would be an inspiring new hub of Uptown activity. The lobby of the tower is framed by tall two-story floor-to-ceiling windows that look out across a lively plaza toward Tryon Street, Charlotte’s main thoroughfare. Legacy Union knew they needed a modern digital visual feature so compelling it couldn’t be ignored.
The Challenges:
One of the most fundamental challenges faced by Legacy Union in their pursuit of transforming the lobby of Bank of America Tower with an inviting and inspiring digital visual experience was the sheer size of the task. The tall two-story glass windows that enclose the lobby invite endless floods of ambient light into the space and with such high visibility come high stakes; all eyes would be on this space so it had to be truly exceptional lest it compromise the overall perception of the development. These conditions pared the list of potential digital display options down until only the very best and brightest remained. Further restrictions required a front-serviceable solution given that the marble and concrete wall onto which the display would be affixed had already been built. Infrastructure limitations required the display operate without any cooling equipment and both Legacy Union and the building’s architecture firm LS3P prioritized working with a display provider that was both familiar from past work and utterly reliable into the future.
The Solutions:
Facing a litany of design, integration, and technology hurdles, Legacy Union and LS3P brought on the integration experts from Cenero to get the project moving in the right direction. According to Frank Milesky, the Southeast Area Director for Cenero, “for a digital wall that’s going to be showing local scenes, ball games, marketing content and other visuals 24 hours a day, we needed to trust the technology we chose to last for years to come.” Having recently completed a similarly ambitious videowall project in Charlotte Douglas International Airport, Cenero returned to the display provider they had used for that award-winning installation, NanoLumens, knowing they could be relied upon. NanoLumens proved to be one of the only candidates capable of building a frontserviceable display designed to cool by convection. Their display also mounted at a much shallower depth than competitors since it didn’t require third-party mounting. With NanoLumens on board, the team installed a 64-foot wide by 36-foot tall LED display with a total surface area nearly 3.5 times the size of a highway billboard. Though plans for the display called for a variety of sports content, marketing messaging, and local scenes, the team contracted interactive design studio Second Story to create mesmerizing fullscreen imagery. An Extron Quantum Ultra 610 videowall processor drives the display.
The Results:
Believed to be the largest native 4K display ever installed indoors, the 4.7mm pixel pitch Nanolumens display in the lobby of Bank of America Tower was designed in such a way that it could function both as one enormous screen or several separate screens, with the most popular style splitting the display into 16 separate screens each measuring 16’ x 9’. The resolution of the display allows for any style of modern content to be shown without reformatting or special processing, including the immersive rainbow amalgamation from Second Story dubbed “Unify,” Carolina Panthers games, and additional drone footage of Charlotte. Today, these visuals cascade outward through the tall two-story lobby windows onto the grassy plaza outside, stealing the attention of anyone in the vicinity and confidently delivering a message of modernity and cohesiveness to a city on the rise. “It’s so refreshing to see more developers using canvases like this to inspire and enhance communities, built environments, and public spaces,” said Joel Krieger, the Executive Creative Director for Second Story. More and more locations are integrating similar “architecture-as-art” features to bring their communities together and now the people of the Queen City have a crowning experiential visual achievement of their own to enjoy.
The Technology:
The Nanolumens Performance Series display measures 64 feet wide by 36 feet tall and features a 4.7mm pixel pitch. Its native resolution is a little larger than native 4K and it runs content from Second Story through a Quantum Ultra 610 processor from Extron. Its resolution is 4096x2304.
