Corporate Environments- Legacy Union Bank of America Tower Lobby

The DSF if highlighting the finalists of the 2020 DSF Awards as “Work that Wins”

The Bank of America Tower in Charlotte, North Carolina, sought a way to draw the community together into an inspiring new hub of Uptown activity. Today, immersive visuals from the largest native 4K display ever installed indoors cascade outward through the building’s 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.

BACKGROUND

 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 is centered by the Bank of America Tower. The lobby of this 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. Said Hal Shute from LS3P, the building’s architects, “this is a world-class office building, so we looked at cutting edge ideas and technologies that could bring the lobby and public space into the 21st century, while making a real impact on both the space’s design and its relevance to the community.”

CHALLENGES

One of the most fundamental challenges faced by Legacy Union during this project 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 architecture firm LS3P prioritized working with a display provider that was both familiar from past work and utterly reliable into the future.

SOLUTIONS

Facing a litany of design, integration, and technology hurdles, Legacy Union and LS3P brought on the integration experts from Cenero. According to Frank Milesky of 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.” LED provider NanoLumens proved to be one of the only candidates capable of building a front-serviceable 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. The display now showcases mesmerizing full-screen imagery from Second Story, alongside games, local footage, and marketing content.

RESULTS

Believed to be the largest native 4K display ever installed indoors, the 4.7mm pixel pitch NanoLumens lobby display was designed to 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 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. “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.

Nominating Company- NanoLumens
Project Name- Legacy Union Bank of America Tower Lobb