GKD Metal Fabrics | LED There Be Light & Going Up

LED There Be Light

...the beauty, practicality and transparency of metal fabric with the jazzy enchantment of moving lights.

The idea of bathing buildings in light goes back to the beginnings of the last century and Coney Island’s wondrously illuminated Luna Park. Taking a leaf from that earlier crowd pleaser, advertisers filled Times Square’s “Great White Way” with building-sized billboards gloriously festooned with all-manner of blinking, scrolling and spinning colored lights.

Looking to the past and leaping into the future, GKD has engineered a product that combines the beauty, practicality and transparency of metal fabric with the jazzy enchantment of moving lights.

Mediamesh is constructed of Tigris embedded with LED’s. Because the LED’s are literally woven into the structure, no transparency is lost—you can still see through the material. The embedded LED’s are programmed and controlled remotely through a web-based user interface.

The LED’s can be programmed to display everything from solid color to graphic messages. When unlit, the fabric has the appearance of woven stainless steel. When illuminated, the LED’s create a lit façade that envelopes the structure within.

As Stephan Kufferath, managing director of GKD, points out, “Architects and their clients are often looking for ways to incorporate media messaging into buildings and the best want it integrated and subtle. Mediamesh offers the perfect solution.”

If ever there was an example of the medium being the message, Mediamesh is it.

Above: Mediamesh

Going Up

Riding elevators is probably second only to watching paint dry as a boring way to spend time. Actually worse, since while we don’t have to watch paint dry, we do, however, have to ride elevators.

That said, anything that can be done to better the experience is much appreciated. With this in mind, the designers of 2 Broadway (NYC) obligingly clad the walls of the building’s elevators in GKD’s Omega 1500. Elegantly textured, the very durable, opaque, small-scale, stainless-steel woven fabric raises the elevator interiors to new heights of understated luxury.

Omega 1510, 1520, Square, Ocean, Baltic, and Delphin are other GKD woven fabrics that also take elevator interiors to glistening new heights.

Up, up and away.