Sign Builder Illustrated - May 2008 - (Page 28)

to the Times Square area. “They held a design competition for its new headquarters, and the Paris- and Genoa-based Renzo Piano Building Workshop won,” says Pentagram’s Michael Bierut. “Its proposal was rational and elegant: a tower of floor-to-ceiling ultra-clear glass walls, veiled with a second skin of horizontal white ceramic rods on an aluminum frame. The rods also shield the glass walls from direct sunlight and reduce the heat gain that usually requires tinted glass, while they bounce light onto the interior walls.” However since this unique building is (obviously) located near Times Square, its design was subject to the district’s special zoning requirements that had been adopted in 1993 to preserve the area’s unique character. “These ordinances mandate that signs and displays have to be large (based on ratios of sign area to overall elevation area) and applied (added to the building rather than subtly integrated),” explains Bierut. “Because the building is located in the Times Square district, the city and state initially requested that we incorporate flashing lights similar to other signs in the area,” states Thurm. “[But all we] wanted was to create a sign that would work well with the overall design 28 Sign Builder Illustrated May 2008 of our new building, so these officials were open to other approaches.” Read All About It: Putting It Together! The New York Times Company started the project by preparing a number of mock-ups and sharing them with Pentagram, to help everyone better understand the colors that could be used and ensure that they’d be able to achieve the desired effect. Pentagram was faced with a daunting question right from the onset: Just how does one add a nearly-block-long, fifteen-foot-tall black letter logo to the front of a minimalist building without obstructing the view of the newspaper staffers working inside? “We [broke] the sign up into smaller, painted extruded aluminum sleeves a little more than three inches in diameter— 959 of these pieces to be exact,” explains Bierut. “Each letter in the Times logo was rasterized, that is, divided into narrow horizontal strips, ranging in number from 26 (for the “i” in “Times”) to 161 (for the “y” in “York”). Each resulting piece was then made into a three-dimensional form that could then be fitted over the building’s ceramic sunscreen rods.” There were several reasons why Pentagram’s solution worked. “First Renzo Piano’s design for the curtain wall included the screen of horizontal ceramic rods,” says Beirut. “Second the special Times Square signage guidelines required that the building design incorporate a large attached sign. And third we wanted to preserve the views of anyone who had an office on floors behind the sign. Dividing up the sign as we did created the effect of a dramatic dimensional sign from street level, while appearing nearly invisible from inside the building on the upper floors.” Pentagram designers also agreed to install a “beak,” which added an additional two inches of projection to enhance the sign’s street-level visibility. Meanwhile Benson Industries (www.bensonglobal.com) of Portland, Oregon, cut, fabricated, and painted all the pieces. “The final product created a screened image—much like the process used in printing a newspaper,” Thurm remarks. “[Therefore] the large, distinctive sign is also a demonstration of our business.” The idea of designing a dynamic sign that kept with (and complemented) the architecture of the building was quite a challenge. “We liked the concept of this current sign, because it made good use

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Sign Builder Illustrated - May 2008

Sign Builder Illustrated - May 2008 Contents SBI Agenda Quotes & Comments Contributors Costly Concerns Dispatches Sign Show Dateline: Time to Find a New Identity Teaching a New Dog Old Tricks Sign Illumination: It’s Time to Pay Attention Restoring Old Photographs for Digital Printing Price Doesn’t Sell the Signs You Want to Make Architects in LED Codes for Electric Signs: Don’t Get Blindsided! Digital Displays at the Pearl Harbor Museum The Art of Wayfinding Signage Grand Format National Following Traffic Sign Regulations Designs on ADA Signage Painting Professionally SBI Marketplace Imagine-It Graphics

Sign Builder Illustrated - May 2008

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