THE «ELIN» VIDEO SCREEN AS A LANDMARK OF RUSSIAN ENGINEERING DESIGN
Day-time and artificial illumination creates drastically different images of perception. The same urban landscape during the day look very different at night-time. Therefore, the development of a night city medium requires different types of approaches.
The first time a professional interest was taken in the unity of a medium and features of night perception when Robert Venturi published “Learning from Las Vegas” in 1972, co-authored with his wife D. Scott Brown and with S. Izenour. The authors showed that under conditions of insufficient illuminance, the architecture does not determine a specific character of the medium space. The role of spatial and composition reference points is switched to illuminated signs, while elements of the architectural medium are only captured incidentally.
R. Venturi was a theorist of postmodernism and one of the most strong-minded critics of the rational aesthetic. He presented a modern building as “a shelter with decoration”. This concept in essence divided from asceticism of functional aesthetics, considering decor to be excessive squandering and a real crime concerning aesthetics of shaping industrial forms. As a critical response to the “sterility” and unification of the “international” style, R. Venturi in his call for variety, purported any creative improvisation, including those containing an addressing historical styles of past epochs. Absolutely unconventional was the fact that he urgently recommended architects to learn lessons of medium formation from the commercial advertising of night-time Las Vegas. He perceived the arbitrary mosaic of uncontrollable “barbarous” advertising as an example of mobility and of an individual singularity of medium arrangement. R. Venturi suggested that chaos just is a special unevident form of order. An important function of form-shaping a medium space was given to the vital charm of the casual, the “ugly and ordinary”. The principle of surface décor and collageness was countered with the faceless “sterility” and with a non-chromaticity of the rational aesthetics.
Humans cannot orientate themselves with ease in the night medium. Nature has predetermined the day-time for humans’ vital activity. Nevertheless, a significant part of the population of any metropolis must lead some form of nocturnal lifestyle. The big city life does not stop: many businesses continue to work into the night, transport networks keep moving, life in recreational and entertainment districts becomes more active. Metropolises need well illuminated streets and avenues, businesses and stores working round the clock, food service areas, places for walks and entertainment. All of these require special illumination. The functional criteria of a night medium should be ease of movement, safety and psychological comfort. Poor visibility and sparse habitation in some desolate territories can create a criminally prone environment. Good illumination, CCTV installation, and professional patrolling police services will facilitate the creation of conditions for personal safety.
Another important component of a night city is the emotional comfort of the inhabitants. This can be achieved through uniting the efforts of all of the city’s illumination services; street lighting, light advertising, illumination of architectural aspects and so on. Light information and advertising accomplish many functions, including: 1) visual, information, advertising and optional tasks; 2) safety, assisting standard illumination of the city medium both at different levels of areas of pedestrian visibility; 3) maintaining a wide-awake state; 4) solution of medium visual harmonization tasks.
Light design of a modern city has a large variety of lighting systems: from different types of luminaires and video screens to laser shows, light-kinetic and light-projection installations (video-mapping). The plurality of systems comes from the wide variety of illumination tasks. In choosing lighting systems, ideas and tastes play a key role, as do energy efficiency considerations. Municipal transport stops are widely being equipped PV cells for solar energy, which means energy accumulated during the day can be used for their illumination in the evening. Light emitting diodes today consume minimal amounts of energy, providing a good light source choice for illuminating large architectural objects economically and in a range of colours. One of the most noticeable elements of light arrangement and of advertising in modern cities is digital advertising using lightemitting diode panels or billboards.
Taking into account all the complexity of working with outdoor advertising, the government of Moscow pays close attention to it. The government has developed and implements methods of regulation and significant reduction of outdoor advertising in the central part of the city. However, these strong-willed approaches are very similar to the ideological decisions, which were made by communist party bodies about art. The chaos of commercial relations does not help achieve success, while some achievements concerning light and light-kinetic advertising during the Soviet period, undoubtedly took place. One can recall the atmosphere of the 1970s when people went on holiday especially to look at the new street illumination. These were the light-kinetic installation “Atom” of V.F. Koleichuk on Kurchatov square, the rotating globe on the Arbat restaurant building (Kalininsky prospekt, now - Novoаrbatsky), the electronic light-graphic Publicolour billboard on Mayakovsky square, illumination of the Central telegraph building (Gorky - now Tverskaya street).
The history of advertising by means of outdoor big screens is more than 120 years long. In 1892, on New York’s Broadway, the first blinking electric sign with an advertising of the Manhattan Beach resort popular at that time was installed. The principle of its operation was very simple: medical students specially employed for this purpose, switched the power supply contact-breaker on and off. In 1905 on Times Square, a 15 metre height advertising installation for Heatherbloom Petticoats appeared (Fig. 1). This example introduced animation and a lamp blinking in different sequences. Then, on the roof of the Normandie Hotel in Manhattan, an advertising installation with an image of a racing chariot, the symbol of Rice Electric Display Company, appeared. It consisted of 20000 multi-coloured bulbs and a 600 h.p. (440 kW) power motor. The installation continuously showed a 30-second program with a frequency of 42 frames/s. The advertisement with the racing chariot was so popular that a special police division was employed to suppress the crowd gathering to look at this miracle of engineering thought.
All of the abovementioned installations were able to show only one program, while a lumiprinter, patented in 1913, allowed creating a programmed image using a transparent film. The film was projected onto photo cells controlling an incandescent lamp panel. During the next 20 or 30 years, this method of transporting a dynamic graphic on video screens continued to be developed. By the 1950s monochrome and multicoloured screens with this technology were widely used in the USA. They were not only used for outdoor advertising, but also as information panels at sports stadiums. In the meantime, similar devices appeared in Europe: in 1953 in Hungary their own video screen was developed. In 1965 in Houston, a big lamp display, more than 140 m in length, was installed at the “Astrodom” covered stadium. The main disadvantage of all these devices was the simplicity of the transmitted images: the resolution of the screen and method of viewing information only allowed transmitting text and primitive drawings.
A revolutionary step in the development of outdoor video advertising was made in 1972 in the USSR. Specialists from the Vinnitsa Central Design Bureau (CDB), an enterprise of the Ministry of Electronic Industry of the USSR, developed the world’s first electronic outdoor video screen capable of reproducing full-colour video information from a film projector, episcope, slide projector and from a text terminal (Figs. 2 and 3).
It was installed in Moscow on Kalininsky Prospekt (now the New Arbat). Later, in 1976, it became possible to show television programmes. Light sources for the huge (240 m2) light matrix display were normal car lamps (А 12-1) covered with optical filters. The lamps were placed line by line and were united into chromatic triads using the RGB-mixing principle. The screen was given the name Elin, which means “electronic informant”. The Elin system worked regularly during twelve years, showing not only advertising, but also the news programme “Vremya” (Time), festive greetings, space communication bridges with the USA, Japan and astronauts. These were its first and especially significant uses.
It is unfortunate that this Soviet screen was not included in western historiography, even though the Elin screen was highly praised in the visitors’ book by specialists from different countries: Great Britain, Australia, Hungary, etc. The comment from the Lord Mayor of Sydney was especially remarkable: “First we were interested, then fascinated. We think that the system has a future in Australia”. At that time, negotiations about creating and installing a video screen system for Australia were under way. But in order to enable this work, it would have been necessary to relocate the leading developers of the Elin system to Sydney for some time, which at that time was impossible.
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The value of the Elin system in the history of outdoor video advertising is difficult to overestimate not only due to the innovations and leaderships of this screen among similar installations, but also because of the special role, which it played in Kalininsky Prospekt. What was this role exactly? There were ambiguous plans in the 1960s to construct a new central avenue in the centre of Moscow after a whole quarter of historical buildings was removed. There was much written and said about this new avenue being strange for Moscow. Ironic names for the Arbat skyscrapers appeared: “a set of false teeth”, “books of a teddy bear”, “ the Pentateuch of Moses”, etc. But as the head of the project M. Posokhin was the main architect of Moscow, the Chairman of the Committee on Civil Building and Architecture and the Deputy chairman of the Building Agency, it was very difficult to oppose this construction. The building project was not finished completely: old housings, which fit poorly into the modern image of the project, were kept on both sides of the avenue. One such object was the famous G.L. Grauerman Maternity Hospital. A blank fireproof wall of the maternity home rose across the wide pedestrian space of the street, disturbing the perspective of the “New Arbat” Avenue. By installing the Elin screen at this place, the designers solved a whole set of problems at once: the screen not only became a key source for city information, which could be seen both from the pedestrian and traffic lanes of the avenue3, it also fitted smoothly into the ensemble of “New Arbat” skyscrapers and covered the wall of the maternity home4. Finally, the Elin accentuated the propaganda value of the avenue and of central Moscow as a “Socialism Show-Window”.
The architecture around the matrix screen was a neutral framework, a pedestal for outdoor advertising. The screen itself, which generated images of the light-kinetic form-shaping, was the main forming element of the medium due to its large scale. The dominant ephemeral light, which became a forming link in the visual medium of the evening city, became the major part of the composition instead of a space object. It was especially important, because evening Moscow in the 1970s was far from the most illuminated European capitals. The emergence of the video screen with the prospect of manufacturing many such installations, partly solved the auxiliary task of creating an illumination medium as well.
The next major step in the development of video screens was made far from Moscow. In the 1980s, the Japanese corporation Mitsubishi installed a new generation electronic video screen “Diamond Vision” at the Dodgers open stadium in Los Angeles. Fundamentally new light-emitting devices were used in its structure, which were capable of giving a high quality image even in direct solar flare. These were vacuum-fluorescent indicators, a kind of a kinescope without the extending part but with a defocusing system and with phosphors of one of three colours: red, blue or green, deposited on the end face of the envelope. The Diamond Vision screen was followed by the Astrovision (Panasonic), Starvision (EEV), Super Colour Vision (Toshiba), JumboTRON (Sony) (Fig. 4), etc.
Soviet engineers tried not to lag behind their western colleagues, and in 1985, approximately at the same time as the emergence of the JumboTRON from the Japanese giant Sony, the Elin was seriously upgraded. The new project created using vacuum-fluorescent indicators was named “Elin 2” (Fig. 5).
At the same time, the house end face under the screen was fronted with big expressive arches of profile aluminum. In front of the formed niches, decorative grilles were installed. By contrast with the verticals of the facing walls and with all the straight lines of the surrounding architectural environment, the decorative grilles had the appearance of modernist soft, sagging lines. This small feature accentuated very intensely the visual connection between casually adjoining 19th century buildings and new buildings, adding a feeling of a “lived-in” space to the architectural ensemble of the avenue. The design embodied the main thought of the avenue designers, who wished to form a medium space, in which “all is subject to a uniform intention: from the general direction of the spatial structure to elements of municipal improvement and advertising”.
Unfortunately, the technological solution of the Elin 2 system was far from perfect. Dark, or too bright squares of failed modules considerably deformed the image. The resolution of the screen (pixel number) and video signal transformation gradation quantity were insufficient for this kind installation. All this essentially limited the display potential for video data.
Programmes were transmitted to the Elin 2 from a video recorder, and the video clips were produced by a specialist production company. All of this required much money and time; power consumption reached 450 kW (Fig. 6).
The technological disadvantages of the screen together with the chaos of change in the country, as well as inefficient economic activity of the Estel management, resulted in stopping operation of the Elin 2 at the beginning of the 1990s.
After the Elin 2 system screen was dismantled, several attempts made to remove the remaining metal structure from this place. A small enterprise “Estel-info” (later on Estel-info Open Company) established by enthusiasts assured of a necessity to modernise and to continue operating the Elin 2 system, prevented the deconstruction. To justify the structures presence, Estel-info Open Company had to use the fireproof wall of the Bank of Moscow and the roof installation of Coca Cola (Fig. 7). To oppose such “monsters” or dismantle their advertising installations was difficult.
Meanwhile, one more technology breakthrough occurred in global practice. In 1993, Japanese Nichia Chemical Industries Company began industrial production of a new kind of blue light emitting diodes. In the same year, the inventor of the blue light emitting diodes Shuji Nakamura and Mitsubishi Corporation received the Emmi award for “pioneering development of emissive technology for large outdoor video screens”. This invention allowed developing a light-emitting diode video screen, which was first proposed in 1968 by James Tietjen of RCA Corporation.
A way out of the Elin unpleasant situation was found in 2001, when the installation of outdoor light-emitting diode screens began in Moscow. In 2005, Estel-info Open Company and News Outdoor Russia Company accomplished a joint project on installation of a light-emitting diode screen in Elin’s place (Fig. 8). The companies convinced many stakeholders that it was important to keep a screen here for the historical legacy of the image of New Arbat. Thus the Elin obtained the right to survive in a new technological format.
As the first outdoor video screen, the Elin became a prototype of modern devices of this type. They are simultaneously facilities for the city’s advertising and major units of composition in lighting and formshaping of the evening medium. The screen performed many composition tasks, such as: 1) creation of a reference point within a homogeneous medium; 2) restoration of the New Arbat pedestrian area (the screen partly served as a vanishing point); 3) due to its large size and to the light spot central position, the screen became the dominant feature of the composition. It steadily “holds” the composition, drawing together smaller elements and playing a part in the general light-and-colour medium unity.
As a major historical object of electronic advertising, and as a determining element of the New Arbat evening perspective, the Elin has safely withstood several phases of technological reconstruction. It invariably evokes good memories and has remained in the same place for more than forty years. Electronic equipment evolved swiftly, but memories have kept the favourite screen on the fi reproof wall of the G.L. Grauerman Maternity hospital.