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museum “inhabits both the site and Seoul in a way that suggests a new dialogue between cities and buildings.” Kennon was a commercial architect with an intellectual program that involved forging this new dialogue. “The big problem that architects have faced,” he says, “is how to energize public space. So much of what used to be public activity has now been superseded by television, the Internet, videoconferencing. You’re trying to say that a life exists in the public realm that’s not virtual; but because that virtual part of us is so ingrained in us, we have to work with it in order to reengage the real world.” The task, in other words, was to revitalize that old sense of Times Square as an agora, a happy urban welter, even as entities like Morgan Stanley were turning Times Square into the central switchboard of the global information network—to harness the abstract, bit-stream world in the service of the face-to-face world that it seemed bent on eradicating. Kennon wanted to create a sign that had the evanescence, the ever-changingness, of information culture and that simultaneously worked as a transfixing object.

The obvious medium for the new sign was LED. Charles Gwathmey had already used LED technology on the first Morgan Stanley building, but he had been compelled to work with a more limited palette. LED uses tiny bulbs that have been placed in a chemical bath so that they emit light at different points of the spectrum, and thus in different colors. Only in the previous few years, however, had blue LED become commercially available, so that now it was possible to work in virtually any color. It had also become possible—though it was very expensive—to buy LED that would reproduce the visual quality of a movie, and thus create a stunningly vivid, color-drenched image. But Kennon didn’t want to turn the new building into a giant TV set. “Normally you buy LED in eight-inch-by-eight-inch panels,” he says. “But you can buy the panels like Lego blocks in whatever configuration you can think of. You can completely break the box.” In other words, LED allowed you to project imagery in any size or shape you could think of; it was not only programmable, unlike neon or vinyl, but almost infinitely malleable. “There is,” Kennon says, “a strong cultural tradition of receiving mediated information through a framing device”—a proscenium, a TV set. “Now you have something which has the possibility of being completely different. The frame can transform into a fragment, into pieces, into things that are not framed.”

In the other post-1987 Times Square buildings, signs had been slapped onto buildings; even at 1585 Broadway, the sign was an afterthought. Kennon wanted to blur altogether the distinction between the permanent and massive material of the building’s skeleton and the transitory and insubstantial material of its imagery—between architecture and media. He wanted to create panels of LED that would be fused into the façade of the building, so that the viewer would be reading not the sign, but the building itself. And Morgan Stanley had agreed that the sign would feature computer-generated programming, rather than the kind of electronic stock ticker used at 1585. That building was known around the company as “the head”; the new building was supposed to demonstrate the company’s heart. “We wanted to portray Morgan Stanley as a service-oriented, family-oriented, global-oriented firm that cares not just about money,” says Susan Jarrett.

In order to create the programming, Kennon and Clement hired a downtown design firm called Imaginary Forces, which specialized in using computer graphics to create whimsical and ingenious movie credits. But Imaginary Forces had also gained familiarity with LED when it was called on to design the giant screen at the Baltimore Ravens football stadium. Mikon van Gastel, the Dutch designer who headed the project, spent long hours with Kennon discussing the idea of a sign that not only was as big as a building but was a building. Van Gastel says that Kennon told him, “I want to question what a façade is.