Making a Sky of the Ceiling: A Lineage of Screens Overhead

Las Vegas, Fremont Street. After dark, at the top of each hour, the whole ceiling overhead begins to glow. Above the pedestrian mall, a barrel-vaulted screen 1,375 feet long (about 419 metres), hung some 27 metres above the ground, starts to flicker all at once in time with music. People stop walking, tilt their heads back, and look up at the place where the night sky used to be. For a few minutes, the ceiling of the street becomes a sky.

When we picture a screen in the city, we usually picture a wall — the vision board at an intersection, the LED façade sheathing a building, the rows of signage in a station concourse. All of them are images on a vertical plane. But the city has another surface, vast and almost entirely unused: the overhead. Ceiling, canopy, sky. When a screen is raised across this plane — the one we habitually edit out of our attention — signage changes from something looked at into something looked up at.

This essay traces the lineage of that screen overhead. From Fremont, to the enormous screen the same designer hung over a plaza in Beijing, to a ceiling in Chicago that opened a fabricated sky inside an atrium, to the suspended volumes in an Edmonton lobby that display the weather as it is right now. Four cases describe a half-century movement in which the way we set light into the overhead void has shifted from the spectacle of a show toward an atmosphere left always running.

A Canopy Raised Over the Street

The Fremont Street Experience opened in 1995. It turned five blocks of downtown Las Vegas into a pedestrian mall and covered the whole of the sky above it with a barrel-vaulted screen — an idea without precedent at the time. The designer was Jeremy Railton, head of Entertainment Design Corporation and a designer of live spectacle who had staged the ceremonies of the Los Angeles Summer Olympics and the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.

This screen — Viva Vision — has been renewed in stages. The second generation, in 2004, rebuilt it as a high-definition panel holding some 12.5 million LEDs; on New Year's Eve 2019 it was reborn again as a third generation, at a cost of 32 million dollars. The maker was Watchfire Signs, of Illinois. Roughly 49.3 million LEDs, more than 16.4 million pixels, a resolution of 15,104 × 1,088, a brightness of 5,000 nits, and a 600,000-watt sound system. Against the old version, resolution rose fourfold and brightness sevenfold.

The flashiness of the spec sheet, though, is not the essence of the device. What Fremont invented was a way of holding the body — one produced by raising a screen overhead rather than against a wall. At the top of each hour a six-to-eight-minute show plays free of charge, from six in the evening until two in the morning. People stop, lift their heads, and form a crowd at their own feet. The screen turns the street from a place to pass through into a place to linger. Like a chime striking the hour, it marks the city's rhythm, and at fixed intervals it generates a few minutes in which total strangers all look up in the same direction.

The Same Author, a Ceiling Over the Plaza

Twelve years after Fremont, Railton restaged the same idea of "raising it overhead" on the other side of the world, in an utterly different urban context: The Place (世貿天階), in Beijing's central business district. At the heart of this retail complex, which had its soft opening in 2007, a vast LED canopy 250 metres long and 30 metres wide was hung horizontally over the plaza linking two buildings, at a height of about 80 feet — six storeys — above the ground. The LED panels were supplied by Opto Tech of Taiwan, at a total cost of roughly 250 million yuan. At its opening it was reckoned among the largest screens in Asia.

If Fremont is a "roof over a street," then The Place is a "ceiling over a plaza." Against the barrel vault covering a pedestrian mall, here is a single sky stretched flat above a commercial plaza. Into two contrasting urban vessels — the American pedestrian mall and the Chinese commercial plaza ringed by high-rises — the same designer set the same gesture. The vocabulary of spectacle Railton had honed in Olympic ceremonies flowed into Beijing's artificial ceiling as video shows themed on space and sky.

The two screens are twins in one respect: both turn the overhead into a place to gather and look up. But from there the lineage branches away from this performance-driven canopy — toward bringing a quieter "sky" indoors, rather than a spectacle.

Opening a Sky Indoors

November 2017, the Gold Coast of Chicago. 900 North Michigan Shops — a seven-level vertical retail complex facing Michigan Avenue — gained, as the centrepiece of a renovation roughly thirty years after it was built, a single enormous digital band across its ceiling. It was the work of ESI Design, a New York–based experience-design studio (a studio of NBBJ). The client was JMB Realty.

An ultra-high-definition LED surface roughly 190 feet long (about 58 metres) and some 3,500 square feet in area, at a 4-millimetre pitch, was laid across the atrium ceiling in ten sections. Visible from every floor, the device was designed as a giant skylight that connects the interior to the sky outside by illusion. Its imagery is filmed in 16K, so that rustling trees, a shifting sky, and local birds open overhead as trompe-l'œil. Tenant names and products are converted into kaleidoscope animations, dissolving advertising information into the grammar of ornament.

Where Fremont and The Place were "shows that gather a crowd on the hour," something different is happening here. The ceiling of 900 North Michigan does not stage a show. Instead, rustling trees and sky flow continuously, like an atmosphere. The object of looking up has moved from "performance" to "environment." This gesture of disguising the ceiling as sky can also be read as inheriting, in digital video, the long tradition by which church frescoes painted heaven onto the ceiling. The atrium of a retail complex — a vertical void that is functional by nature — is reread as a place for gazing up at a sky.

Suspended, the Sky of Now

The point the same ESI Design reached three years later is the most suggestive case in this essay. February 2020, downtown Edmonton, Canada. In the lobby of the office tower HSBC Place, the city's first permanent digital art installation, Prisms, was set in place.

Suspended from the ceiling are six enormous five-sided LED boxes, each 260 square feet. Floor-to-ceiling LED columns supplement them, and through the all-glass façade they are visible from the street as well. The device was meant to turn an office lobby — "a space no one without a purpose would bother to visit" — into a place one wants to visit.

In two respects, Prisms carries the lineage of the ceiling screen one step further. First, it is volumetric rather than flat. To give the five-sided forms the illusion of depth and let them hold as solids from every angle, ESI borrowed the production techniques of video games and VR for the imagery. Second, what it shows is the "state of now." Into images of Edmonton's landscape, its night sky, and the ocean, live data — the time of day, the season, and the weather — is folded in. Where the ceiling of 900 North Michigan ran a "fabricated sky," the overhead of Prisms shows the time and weather actually underway outside. From an illusory sky to a sky that responds to data. This journal has taken up the subject of weather-responsive screens in a separate piece as well.

From Spectacle to Atmosphere

Draw a single line through the four cases and one movement comes into view.

Fremont and The Place — Jeremy Railton's two canopies — are screens as spectacle. They stage a show on the hour, generate a crowd at one's feet, and turn strangers to face the same way. Here the overhead image works as a device that produces a social event. ESI Design's two ceilings — 900 North Michigan and Prisms — are screens as environment. They hold no show; they let sky, trees, and weather flow on continuously, like an atmosphere. If the former takes "gathering" as its condition, the latter takes the "sign, the air of a thing" as its subject.

This movement is not a story of technical progress. It is a change in editorial judgement about what to set into the overhead plane. Spectacle is strong. But strong light can sustain itself only as an hourly ritual. The "sky as atmosphere," always overhead, is weak. And yet it keeps company with the very time a person spends in that place. Not a one-time performance but an overhead that enters the field of view again and again, changing with the season and the weather — it is a different kind of screen, one that lays down strata in the memory of the viewer.

There is an old word this journal returns to again and again: tenkei, the point in a landscape. In ink-wash painting, a single figure or small boat brushed into a vast expanse of blank space brings the landscape to life — the word names that small presence. If ma is the concept of opening up space, then tenkei is the concept of setting meaning into the place that has been opened.

In the city, the overhead is perhaps the largest ma of all: a blank that no one uses and no one looks at, left open. The light of Fremont, the ceiling of The Place, the fabricated sky of Chicago, the suspended volumes of Edmonton — each was an attempt to set meaning into that blank. Integrated into architecture and raised overhead, these screens function, within the landscape of a street or a plaza or a lobby, as points that rise up only in the instant one looks up.

Prospects

The lineage of the screen overhead is still young. Compared with the wall screen, which has become common sense in the city, the overhead plane has only just begun to accumulate trials. Airports, station concourses, underground arcades, atriums — there are far more places in the city where people naturally look up than one might think. Whether the screens raised there move toward Fremont-style spectacle or ESI-style atmosphere will be decided by the quality of time each place holds.

What is certain is this: so long as the overhead remains an "opened ma," attempts to set a point of meaning into it will continue. The gesture of making a sky of the ceiling is no more than one present-day form of a long desire — the human wish to find a firmament on the inside of a building, from fresco to artificial canopy. How these screens will grow, each with the time of its own city, remains an open question.

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Sources

1. fig.001Viva Vision Light Show — Fremont Street Experience (official)
2. [2]Fremont Street Experience Unveils Stunning New 3D Graphics And $32 Million Upgraded Viva Vision Canopy — PR Newswire(2019-12)
3. [3]Watchfire Signs Selected for Las Vegas Fremont Street Experience Renovation — Watchfire Signs
4. [4]Fremont Street Experience — Wikipedia
5. [5]LED skyscreen creates unique ceiling for The Place — LEDs Magazine(2007)
6. [6]How I Did That: The Great Screen Of China (Jeremy Railton) — Live Design
7. [7]Jeremy Railton: A designer’s notebook — InPark Magazine
8. fig.002900 North Michigan Shops — ESI Design (NBBJ)
9. [9]900 North Michigan Shops Makeover By ESI Design — The Drum
10. fig.003Prisms at HSBC Place — ESI Design (NBBJ)
11. [11]Edmonton Office Tower Adds Prisms — LED Light Boxes Suspended Over Lobby — Sixteen:Nine(2020-11-23)
12. [12]The Place Beijing — Sky Screen (official)