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By Root 577 0

floor flashed on the sign, a schematic image of an elevator would rise to that floor, the doors would open to show the activities on the floor, ultimately leading to one particular employee at work; text superimposed on the picture might say, “Little League coach,” or some other heartwarming—and fictitious—piece of identification. Instead of allowing the owner to project images onto the viewer, the sign was giving the viewer access, at least illusionistically, to the otherwise hidden core of the enterprise—to its “heart,” as it were.

Kennon and Clement designed the building in such a way as to fully incorporate the sign. The LED panels, each forty feet wide and eight feet high, were placed inside pockets formed by structural elements of the façade. The three horizontal bands covered spandrels, dark areas that contain plumbing and wiring, and alternated with windows of equal height, so that when an image played over the building, a viewer would have to imaginatively fill in the blanks created by the intervening floors—another means of connecting the spectator in the street with the extravaganza in the sky.

No one had ever designed anything like this before, and the technical problems were staggering. Each horizontal panel contained 5,346 pixels; a standard movie screen, by contrast, has 2,048. So much imagery could run on the building at once that Van Gastel had to use three powerful computers to create separate images and superimpose them on one another in order to see what the façade would look like at any given moment. What’s more, the LED panels were set inside the decorative mullions that ran up the façade; the software had to be programmed with five-pixel-wide blank spaces wherever a mullion would be located. The graphic information had to be programmed so that as it moved across the façade it would disappear or explode as it reached one of these vertical dividers—as if the building itself were a mediating device—and then reassemble on the other side. And the programming would grow more complex over time: Phase Two would add a layer of sound to the imagery, while Phase Three would incorporate sensors that would allow changes in weather or traffic to influence the imagery. After years of toil, the building would be everything the architects and designers had dreamed of— a sign that would be admired in Starbucks and anatomized in architectural journals and media studies departments.

By the summer of 2001, LED was beginning to emerge as the new medium of corporate spectacularity. NASDAQ had built a giant cylindrical sign jutting out over the street at the northeast corner of 42nd and Broadway, though all sign connoisseurs agreed that the quality of both the LED and the programming was poor. On the other side of Broadway, Reuters had commissioned the designer Edwin Schlossberg to create programming for a series of giant black panels that run down one vertex of the building and then continue just above the street level on two sides— and to use, as Morgan had, the highest quality of imagery.

Morgan planned to fully occupy its new building on November 15, 2001, so the programming was to be fully operational by then as well. Over the summer, Morgan installed the incredibly elaborate equipment required to operate the sign, and then began experimentally running the programming. It was during this period that passersby could see the piggybank gavotte, and the bouncing apples, and the pedestrians and the bridge. And then came the terrorist attacks of September 11. Suddenly, the idea of having your employees concentrated in the world’s most famous urban space lost its appeal; within weeks, Morgan Stanley was scouting for new locations and for a buyer for its “heart.” It quickly found the latter in Lehman Brothers, which had lost its headquarters, in the World Financial Center. In early October, Lehman bought the building, for $700 million. The sign, which had been four years in the making, was an afterthought. By the time Lehman formally took title, in early December, three of the six segments were up and running, but Lehman