Twin 58-Floor Office Towers In China Are Godzilla-Size LED Billboards At Night

August 5, 2021 by Dave Haynes

When people in New York City raised a major stink about a barge on the river acting as a floating LED billboard, my first thought was that if they were upset with that, they will go thermonuclear when a media company tries to emulate what’s happening in China.

Entire office buildings and central business district skylines are being turned into light shows and advertising boards.

These are the twin towers of the Tianfu International Financial Center in Chengdu, in the Sichuan region of China. The towers are both 58 floors and more than 700 feet tall, and they are clad in what I assume are LED mesh. The supplier was BOE, but I am thinking they sold it but got the LED from another company. BOE is largest supplier on the planet for LCD flat panels, but maybe they have LED subsidiaries.

Unlike some scheduled light shows on office towers in places like Hong Kong, this is full-on advertising, on a massive scale.

It would be much, much, much harder for a media company to get approvals on this sort of thing in a western country like the U.S. or Canada, but if you think back 10-15 years, there was a fair amount of objection to LED billboards along highways … and now they’re common in most jurisdictions.

We already see office towers in North America and Europe taking on LED mood lighting, so you could imagine how these could gradually, somewhat stealthily have more LED and more ability to show images and motion graphics.

In terms of scale, this set-up is kind of amazing, though it is a prime example of the need to view coarse pixel pitch displays from a big distance. At close quarters, it looks kinda terrible.

If I had a condo or apartment in Manhattan, I would not be happy to see this across the river in Jersey City or Long Island City. But you just know someone out there is looking into this sort of thing.