The Starrett-Lehigh building located in New York City was originally constructed in 1931 as a transportation and distribution center. The building spans the entire block between 11th and 12th Avenues consisting of 2.3 million square foot of work space making it one of the largest building footprints in NYC. In 2021 the property underwent a major restoration and update project which included the creation of a brand new marketing and hospitality suite.
Innov8ive Group in partnership with VMG Creative, worked with RXR Realty to design and execute a creative concept for their new marketing and hospitality suite. The Starrett-Lehigh building features large polygonal corners with alternating bands of steel strip windows and rows of brick. The buildings iconic shape also serves as the main element in the SL logo. Rather than build a standard (and boring) video wall, Innov8ive Group designed a signature piece that serves as both an artistic visual element within the space, as well as a practical video canvas.
We developed a custom cloud hosted web application that communicates with an iPad app used on site. It enables the SL team to easily switch between content options as well as upload client welcome messages and logos to the wall, calculating for the non-traditional screen layout and negative space between the LED tiles, insuring logo’s and text do not get cut off.
In order to implement this concept, there were a number of engineering challenges that we needed to solve for. The physical wall this install was being featured on was sheetrock mounted directly over the buildings concrete structure, not allowing for any access to the backside of the wall. The mounting solution had to be external to the wall and extremely low profile to stay within building code. Another challenge was the distance people would view the wall at, which often would be within 10ft. We needed to use an extremely low pixel pitch tile such that the viewer doesn’t see the individual pixels, and one that could also give us the creative ability to shape the wall in non-traditional way. Due to space and design considerations, the only place the electronics necessary to run the wall could be located was a server closet that was 100ft away.
Innov8ive Group worked with Christie Digital’s MicroTile solution which allows for both the power supply and video processors to be completely decoupled from the LED tile. The final result is an ultra high resolution artistic LED video wall that directly matches the dimensions of the the Starrett-Lehigh logo and one that has to be seen in person to truly appreciate.