Dexia Tower, Brussels

The dexia tower can be found in Place Rogier in Brussels where each day and night is ensured to be the cities best landmark attraction. The building is made from 6,000 windows and at the bottom of 4,200 of these there is a rail which contains 12 lightbulbs, with LED's in red, green and blue.

Each window in the building acts like a pixel and can make shapes, adverts or type. For the building to work successfully each window blind in the building must be closed as the light will not cover the whole surface of the window.



To make this all happen the bank teamed up with lab[au] who helped build an interactive station which was installed at the bottom of the building. This meant that members of the public could create interact with the building in real time to create their very own light show. Furthermore, their compostition could be photographed from another tall building in the city by a push of a button and then forwarded via email or printed out and taken home. lab[au] refer to the work they produce as 'MetaDesign'. 'Design' is in reference to the Bauhaus and 'Meta' is coming straight from computer science.



By many this building may be seen as a waste of resources and just another contribution to global warming. However, the building is not as big of a waste of energy as it may be thought to be. In actual fact, in recent tests the Dexia tower uses a third less electricity than the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The building effectively uses an LED lighting system (electro luminescent diodes) in which each LED only uses one watt of electricity.