The Prow
In collaboration with ESI Design
Structural Engineering: Craft Engineering
Year: 2020
Location: New York, NY
Parallel Development's most challenging project to date, The Prow is a 65’ chandelier that hangs down a triangular stairwell atrium between the 29th and 35th floors of Warner Media’s HQ at 30 Hudson Yards. Working in collaboration with ESI Design once again, we took the art of electronic media installation to new levels of scale and complexity and have left a colorful mark on the city skyline.
The Prow occupies the top of a glass wedge that juts out from the northeastern corner of the KPF designed skyscraper, clearly visible from 34th street and along the west side. ESI’s concept was to fill this diaphanous vertical space with a dynamic lighting installation to show WarnerMedia’s content to both its employees and visitors, as well as the city outside.
Tim Bishop, previously with Parallel, resolved the proposed ellipsoidal section of the chandelier by setting circular hoops made up of LED boards at an angle to the vertical axis of the piece. The hoops have multiple concentric rings of pixels that provide volumetric depth. They are supported by twenty fiberglass clad copper rods that serve as both the structural support of the 4000lb chandelier and as the conductors that deliver up to 65,000 watts of power to the LEDs – enough juice for a handful of suburban homes.
The piece runs on proprietary LED control technology developed by Parallel over the past decade, pushed to new limits of performance. Each of the 250,000 pixels is driven at high refresh rates and supple color control with power and data distribution that is miniaturized to the point that it disappears into the fabric of the piece. The hoop PCBs – designed by Parallel electrical engineer Mohammad Asgari – get all that power and data to the pixels on boards with complex geometry and minimal surface area while adhering to UL and FCC requirements. ESI’s content – facilitated through custom mapping software developed by Rare Volume – is delivered to the electronics over a DVI video interface.
The tall structure is stabilized by a system of tension cables designed by Craft Engineering. While the weight of the piece is supported by the copper busbars, six stainless ropes are stretched under thousands of pounds of tension between the floor and ceiling on the inside of the elliptical form to prevent any lateral movement. To maintain a constant load on these cables, while allowing for deflection of the building, the cables terminate to a moving spring plate in a polished stainless-steel base bolted to the floor.
Installation and maintenance logistics posed another major obstacle, as there is simply no room for lift access between the stairwell and the piece. Parallel’s Robin Zeitoun – both welder and industrial rope access technician – helped to develop installation and service narratives that involve rappelling from a trim ring of stainless steel on the atrium ceiling. The piece was built in 16 sections in our Brooklyn shop, which we then assembled one after the other at floor level as the piece was lifted higher and higher, under power, and driven by temporary test equipment during assembly. Once full height was reached, a rope access team from Mistras Group made the final structural and electrical connections in the air.
