Pavilion In Chinese Mega-City Park Animates Its Front With LED-Embedded Glass Curtain Wall
June 17, 2022 by Dave Haynes
This is a nice use of LED embedded in building glass at some sort of pavilion building in a massive city park in Chengdu, a mega-city in the Sichuan province of China.
The whole front face of the building is curtain wall glass, made up of some 100 glass panels, with 14 different sizes. The glass panels are all the same pixel pitch, though: 10mm. The power supplies are at the top of each panel, and as you can see in the video, they get sealed just like other windows, with caulking. The set-up is wind and moisture-rated to IP65.
One of the reasons for so many panel sizes is that the corners are curved, so the glass was cut to fit the shape.
I chatted earlier this week with Jack Wilshire of Houston-based American LED Wall, which is selling manufacturer NEXNOVO’s “Novo-Glass” in the U.S. market. The glass is pretty new, and would compete with manufacturers like the Korean firm G-SMATT. NEXNOVO is already well-established in the LED market for its range of mesh-based transparent LED displays.
LG and some other, much smaller manufacturers have LED embedded in transparent film that can be applied to glass, but that product is intended for indoor applications.
What I like about this stuff is that it can turn glass curtain walls into media facades, and that the wiring and LED set-up only minimally disrupt the outside view. The challenge with the mesh products is that people inside are looking out through very visible grills.
Nice! The building’s shape reminds me of VR goggles.
It’s very cool stuff, Dave – We have three retail projects going live in the UK and France in the next couple of months which use this transparent LED glass – As far as I know, the first commercial deployments in Europe!