Moving Types · Media façade
Messages only came together on the bridge.
An interactive LED façade for the Gutenberg-Museum Mainz. Anyone could send it a text message. The letters drifted across the building as points of light and became readable for a moment, in one place.
Explore the case- Role
- Concept, technical planning and set-up in a team of three · adapted for three more venues
- Timeframe
- 2011–2014 · in Mainz running until 2024
- Context
- HfG study project for the z zg and the Gutenberg-Museum Mainz
- Status
- Built at four venues · around 3,000 messages in the first six months
The glass bridge in Mainz, 2012 · Still from our documentary film
01 / Starting point
Could a text message become part of a building?
In October 2011 the Gutenberg-Museum Mainz opened ‘Moving Types – Letters in Motion’, an exhibition on a century of animated type. Its first concept, from 2010, imagined text messages projected onto the glass bridge between the museum’s two buildings, so the exhibition would reach the square outside.
In the summer semester of 2011 our interaction design group took on the façade and the entrance. It was a fourth-semester studio at HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd, supervised by Ralf Dringenberg with Anja Stöffler, who curated the exhibition for the z zg, the centre for time-based design of HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd and Hochschule Mainz.
In Mainz I developed the concept, the technical planning and the set-up with my fellow students Luise Pescheck and Adrian Abele, together with Ralf Dringenberg and Anja Stöffler. For the three venues that followed I adapted the façade to each building with Ralf Dringenberg and Anja Stöffler. Nikolaus Völzow wrote the software; Felix Urban composed the sound.
02 / Site
We started with the square, not the screen.
Before choosing any technology we mapped the place: the paths people take across the Liebfrauenplatz, where they stop and from where the bridge above the museum’s passage can be seen. Six steps led from the first concept to a façade that ran day and night.
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Oct 2010
The idea
Text messages on the glass bridge, projected or on an LED screen.
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Jun 2011
Site analysis
Paths across the square, sight lines and the places where people stop.
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Jun 2011
No projection
Daylight, distance and running day and night ruled it out.
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Jun–Aug 2011
Vertical LED bars
Five LEDs per 21 cm bar, set closer together towards the bridge.
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Aug–Sep 2011
Built to fit
Mounting angles calculated, brackets laser-cut from spring steel at the HfG.
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20 Oct 2011
Opening
The façade runs around the clock.
Dates from the presentations, plans and workshop files of 2010–2011. · Illustration
Design decision
Light bars on the whole façade instead of a projection on the bridge.
A projection onto the glass bridge, as the 2010 concept assumed. Daylight, the distance from the square and a façade meant to run day and night made a projected picture unreliable.
Vertical LED bars spread over the whole building: X-Wall by Richter lighting technologies, five full-colour LEDs per bar, controlled via DMX. The building itself became the display, and the bars could be set closer together exactly where reading should happen.
Slides from our presentations, summer 2011.
03 / Encoding
The text was everywhere, but readable in one place.
A ticker would have turned the museum into a news board. Instead, each message is broken into points of light and spread over the whole façade, so most of the building shows a drifting pattern. Towards the bridge the bars move closer together. On the bridge they form a dense grid, and the points line up into letters, readable for a moment before they fall apart again.
Key insight
Legibility became a place. The message was always on the building, but only the bridge turned it into words. The same idea ran through the exhibition inside, where every film waited behind a code.
04 / Score
Seven rows of light worked like a stave.
The letters are seven points high, so the façade has seven rows of light, like the lines of a stave. We proposed reading them as music. Felix Urban turned that into a sound concept: every row has its own tone, with three variants for the three LED colours, 21 tones in all. When letters reach the end of the façade, they play a short melody over a quiet ground of paper and typing sounds under the bridge.
- Seven rows, seven tonesEach row of light is a line of the stave.
- Three colour variantsper row: 21 LED tones in total.
- A melody on arrivalLetters reaching the end of the façade play.
- A ground of paper and typingruns quietly under the bridge.
People on the square
The façade also reacted to the people beneath it.
Whoever stood on the bridge distorted the letters. Whoever walked through the passage below changed their colour. Sound, distortion and colour change all ran in daily operation.
- On the bridge · the type warps
- In the passage · the colour changes
One spot, November 2011
Same view, four colours.
Four photos taken from the same spot show the colours the letters took on the bridge. Walking through the passage below was one way to change them.
Photos: Martina Pipprich · Original material
05 / Build
We rehearsed the façade on a white model.
Before anything was mounted, we tested the animations on a white model of the façade: a concept video in May, projections onto the model in June. Then came the building work. We calculated the mounting angles, laser-cut brackets for the bars from spring steel in the HfG workshop and planned the cabling. The façade opened with the exhibition on 20 October 2011 and ran around the clock.
The finished bridge, 2011
From the model to the real bridge.
A few weeks after the opening the letters ran over the glass bridge as planned: dense enough to read, scattered again on either side.
On the square, 2012
Type a message, look up, wait for the bridge.
Our documentary film shows the façade in use. In June 2012 a school competition, ‘SMS an Gutenberg’ (text messages to Gutenberg), sent its entries to the façade during the Johannisnacht festival.
06 / Four venues
One idea, adapted to four buildings.
The exhibition travelled, and each venue got a façade of its own, built from the same parts: text messages as input, X-Wall bars and Nikolaus Völzow’s software. Ralf Dringenberg, Anja Stöffler and I adapted it to each building. These were simpler set-ups than Mainz, which remained the conceptual core.
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2011–2024
Gutenberg-Museum, Mainz
A long façade and a glass bridge. The message turns into text only on the bridge.
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Sep–Nov 2012
Galerie im Prediger, Schwäbisch Gmünd
Five windows of the former monastery, facing the street.
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Sep 2013 – Mar 2014
Dortmunder U
The window of the ‘Lautsprecher’ (loudspeaker) on level 4: 368 bars, with a hashtag code.
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Apr–Oct 2014
Alte Post, Schwäbisch Gmünd
LED bars in the glazed stairwell of the HfG building.
Buildings schematic, after the plans for each venue, 2011–2014. · Illustration
Dortmunder U · 2013
In Dortmund, passers-by set the typography.
A hashtag and five digits at the start of a message changed how it appeared: background colour, text colour, size, speed and letter spacing. Zero left the choice to chance. Try the example from the 2013 info sheet, or set your own code.
Hashtag code
0 = random · colours 1–9: white, red, green, blue, yellow, violet, orange, turquoise, black · size, speed and spacing 1–9: from – – – – to + + + +, 5 = standard
After the info sheet of August 2013; colours and steps approximated. · Reconstruction
07 / What remains
The façade outlived the exhibition by more than a decade.
Outcome
- Mainz, 2011–2024
From the opening on 20 October 2011 the façade ran around the clock. It stayed when the exhibition closed and remained part of the museum until 2024, shortly before demolition began to make way for the new Gutenberg-Museum.
- Around 3,000 messages
in the first six months, counted from the façade’s message log, tests included. In June 2012 the school competition ‘SMS an Gutenberg’ sent its entries to the façade.
- Three more façades, 2012–2014
Galerie im Prediger and Alte Post in Schwäbisch Gmünd, and the Dortmunder U, where the hashtag code let people shape the type as well as the text.
- Film, 2011 and 2012
The concept video on Vimeo ↗ and our documentary film on the exhibition, in English on Vimeo ↗.
Reflection
The strongest decision was to make reading depend on a place. It was also the riskiest. From most of the square the façade read as a pattern, not as text, and it relied on people finding the bridge. What I would do differently: test the reading moment on site, at night and from the paths we had mapped, earlier and not mainly on the model, and give the rest of the façade a small cue that leads the eye to the bridge. One question stays open for me: how much of a message has to be readable for a façade to feel like a conversation rather than decoration?
- Team, Mainz 2011
- Dominik Witzke, Luise Pescheck, Adrian Abele · concept, technical planning and set-up
- With
- Prof. Ralf Dringenberg, Prof. Anja Stöffler · z zg, HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd and Hochschule Mainz · later façades together with Dominik Witzke
- Software · sound · LEDs
- Nikolaus Völzow · Felix Urban · Richter lighting technologies (sponsor)
- Film and photos
- Documentary film 2012: Onofrio Di Franco, Adrian Jehle, Marcel Müller, Dominik Witzke · Photos: Martina Pipprich (Mainz, 2011), Dominik Witzke / Adrian Jehle (Galerie im Prediger, 2012)