Four years ago, when Reuters - the London-based photo and news-gathering agency - decided to move its U.S. headquarters to Broadway and 43rd Street on New York's Time Square, it knew it could be swallowed up by the barrage of visual elements at the city's busy intersection.

Flamboyant signs have defined Time Square's visual character for at least a century, so every building erected or renovated as part of the recent redevelopment plan has been required by code to include a minimum square footage of illuminated signage on its façade.

"The cool thing was to take that requirement and create a medium through which
Reuters - not really a well-known brand - could communicate with its public," says Ed Schlossberg, president of Edwin Schlossberg Inc. (ESI, New York), the interactive exhibition firm Reuters turned to for help with brand-bolstering signage.

"Since this building was to be Reuters new U.S. headquarters, it had to feel like the center of the company's world," says Schlossberg, whose 25-year-old firm is best known for interactive installations in museums and other educational facilities. "Its subsidiary, Instinet, an electronic market for stocks, also needed signage that would define and communicate its strengths."

In six months of conceptual development, ESI came up with the solution: a programmable multiscreen LED (light-emitting diode) sign rising nearly 300 feet above street level, spanning 20 stories on the 31-story glass and flamed-granite tower designed by Fox & Fowle.

"The signage had to have a 3-D feel, as if you were looking into the process of the building," Schlossberg says. "We created an optical 'disappearing point' in the middle, so everything could appear to recede into that." A zipper-like series of seven Mitsubishi LED screens - known for their quality images - wraps the corner of the building just above street level, penetrating the glass façade and continuing into the transparent lobby area.

Mounted on the chamfered corner of the tower, just above the zipper, is a 28-by-46-foot rectangular screen, and above it rises the visual piece de resistance - a thin, 170-foot-high column of a screen 13 feet wide. Actually, the screen is a composite of many small screens. But, though separate units, the various screen components are computer-programmed to function as one 13,000-square-foot surface, so images (breaking news headlines and photos, sports and Instinet market reports) flow seamlessly from top to bottom, around the base of the building, and into the lobby. 
(Still to come is a final wedge at the top that will toggle between Reuters programming and news headlines, controlled separately from the other components.)

"We wanted to create the feeling that you are looking at the process of news-gathering, day and night," says Schlossberg. "The news signal comes in from around the world and slides down the antenna-like sign, into the building. To add immediacy, the photographs bear a time code so you can see how long it takes the image to get to the sign from its digital source, which may be any one of Reuters' 1600 photographers around the globe."

There's more. "Since Reuters is not a household word, we wanted to invent something to emphasize the brand," Schlossberg adds, "so we came up with the Reuters Index, measuring the News Heat of the Day - based on the number of breaking stories worldwide and the number of people logging on to the Reuters Internet site. Measured on a Hot News scale of zero to 20, the Reuters Index will build brand familiarity, because an attachment to the news is a part of people's lives today."

To minimize systems maintenance, ESI designed 15 programming templates into which Reuters and Instinet can automatically channel ongoing news feeds from different sources, without the need for editing, monitoring or manipulation by a person in a control room. "We wanted to create a library of templates so we wouldn't have to be constantly involved," Schlossberg says. "It's better, and certainly more economical, to have the client give the ongoing input into your design. We may do more templates in the future, as Reuters requires."

According to ESI project executive Stacey Lisheron, construction of the signage took 18 month, complicated by the fact that no trucks were allowed into the area from Nov. 10, 2001, through Jan. 15, 2002, because of security surronding the Times Square New Year's celebration. 

Another complication was Time Square itself. "How do you test a sign inTimes Square?" Lisheron asks. "There's never any privacy, day or night, to try something out. So the sign was rolled out in stages. We had the first templates in place this past January and February."

When the finishing touches are completed, the sign will have taken four years to conceive and construct, for a reported $20 million. "It's the first time the main vendors, Broadway National and Square One, have been involved with a project where one design firm did not only the physical sign design but also the programming for it," Schlossberg says. "It's the biggest LED sign anywhere, if you read the total 13,000 square feet of signage as one surface - which in a sense it is."

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