Supergraphics, or How Buildings Learned to Shout

Let us begin, as one must, with a definition. A supergraphic is a graphic element scaled up beyond all reasonable need — a stripe, a number, an arrow, a word, a face — applied to a building at a size that makes the building itself seem incidental. The graphic is no longer decoration on the architecture. The graphic is the architecture, or at least the part of it anyone remembers. The wall has become a billboard, and the architect, whether they admit it or not, has become a sign-writer with a bigger budget.

This is the sort of thing architects have complicated feelings about. We are trained to believe that buildings express themselves through mass, void, proportion, the honest articulation of structure — all the things nobody outside the profession has ever once noticed. A supergraphic dispenses with all that. It says what it means in letters three storeys high. There is something almost rude about its clarity.

 The endpoint of the supergraphic: the building as low-resolution screen. Note how the architecture has become merely the thing the pixels are bolted to.

A brief and slightly embarrassing history

The supergraphic proper is usually dated to the 1960s, which is convenient because almost everything embarrassing is. Designers such as Barbara Stauffacher Solomon — working at Sea Ranch in California — took the bold flat geometries of Swiss typography and Pop and simply made them enormous, painting great red stripes and circles across interior walls. The point was partly economic (paint is cheaper than detailing) and partly a kind of cheerful aggression. If the architecture wasn’t going to be interesting, the graphics would do the interesting for it.

But the impulse is far older, and here is where we must be honest with ourselves, because architects love to pretend supergraphics are a modern vulgarity that happened to other people.

Consider the mosaic. Consider the great Byzantine apses, the gold grounds of Ravenna, the colossal Christ Pantocrator staring down from a dome the way a brand logo stares down from a tower. These are supergraphics. They are images applied at architectural scale to do something the masonry alone could not — to instruct, to overawe, to advertise, in the most literal medieval sense. The technology was tesserae rather than vinyl, the client was the Church rather than a sportswear company, and the message was salvation rather than a 30% discount. But the operation is identical: cover the building in a picture bigger than the building can comprehend, and let the picture do the talking.

We could go further back still — Egyptian temple reliefs, Roman triumphal inscriptions cut so deep and so large you could read them from across the forum. Architecture has always wanted to talk. The history of the supergraphic is really the history of a building’s frustrated desire to be understood, finally given a microphone.

The applied, the projected, and the emitted

What’s useful is to sort these things by how the image gets onto the wall, because the method turns out to matter enormously.

The applied supergraphic is the mosaic, the painted stripe, the tiled mural, the vast vinyl wrap. The image is of the surface. It is made of the same durable stuff as the building and it ages with it — the tesserae loosen, the paint fades, the vinyl peels at the corners in a way that is somehow more melancholy than any ruin. The applied supergraphic is committed. It is married to the wall. You cannot turn it off, which means someone, once, had to be sure.

The projected supergraphic is a more recent and far more cowardly thing. Here light is thrown onto the building from somewhere else — a projector across the street, a rig on a neighbouring roof — and the image floats on the façade like a tattoo that washes off in the morning. This is the world of “architectural projection mapping,” of festival light shows and brand activations, where for one weekend a cathedral becomes a swirling galaxy or, more often, an advert for a phone.

The crucial point about the projected supergraphic is that the building doesn’t consent to it. The image is parasitic. It uses the wall as a screen but owes it nothing, and the moment the projector switches off the building reverts to being merely itself, slightly bewildered, like a dignified person who has just been used as a flip-chart at someone else’s conference. There is no commitment here, only rental.

The emitted supergraphic is the one that should worry us. This is the building that generates its own light — LED façades, media walls, the great pixelated screens of Times Square, Tokyo, Seoul, and now everywhere with a planning committee that can be flattered. The image is no longer applied to the surface, nor projected onto it. The surface is the image. The wall has dissolved into pixels.

When the wall becomes a screen

And here is the genuinely interesting thing, the thing worth a blog post: these emitted supergraphics are almost always low resolution.

This is rarely chosen for poetic reasons. A building-sized screen at full retina density would cost a fortune and melt the local grid, so the pixels are huge — sometimes a hand’s-width apart, sometimes a metre — and the resulting imagery is chunky, blocky, a sort of municipal pointillism. From a distance it resolves into something. Up close it’s just a field of coloured lamps bolted to a frame that was once, theoretically, a façade.

The low resolution is the tell. It announces that this is not really architecture wearing an image but rather a very large, very stupid television that happens to be the shape of a building. The image refreshes. It scrolls. It can be different every minute, which sounds like freedom but is in fact the opposite of architecture’s traditional promise. A building is supposed to be the one thing that stays. The emitted supergraphic makes permanence optional. The wall no longer has a face; it has a feed.

The implications, which architects would rather not discuss

So what kind of architecture does this produce?

The first casualty is the elevation itself. For five centuries the façade was the architect’s great set piece — the place where proportion and order and composition were argued out in stone. If the façade is now a screen, the composition is no longer the architect’s job. It belongs to whoever controls the content management system. You design the bezel. Someone in marketing designs the building.

The second casualty is meaning. The mosaic meant one thing, eternally, because someone had paid for it to mean that one thing forever. The media façade means nothing in particular, because it means everything in rotation. It is a building with no fixed convictions, available to the highest bidder by the hour. This is, depending on your temperament, either the perfect architecture for our moment or its most honest confession.

And the third implication — the one I find genuinely strange — is what happens to the building in daylight. The emitted supergraphic only exists at night, glowing. By day it reverts to its true form: a dark, dead grid of lamps and cabling and service gantries, a structure designed around the needs of the screen rather than the needs of people. We have started building façades that are only “finished” after sunset, and that spend the daytime as the unlit back-of-house of their own image. The architecture has become the scaffolding for the picture — which is exactly what the Byzantine apse never was, because the mosaic and the masonry were one thing.

That, I think, is the real shift hiding under all the festival light shows and the planning renders full of imaginary content. The applied supergraphic was a building with an image. The emitted supergraphic is an image with a building reluctantly attached, kept on retainer, switched off in the morning and asked to wait quietly until it’s needed again.

We used to make buildings that spoke. Now we make screens that occasionally remember they’re supposed to be walls.

SEO elements

• Title tag: Supergraphics in Architecture: From Mosaics to Media Façades
• Meta description: From Byzantine mosaics to glowing LED façades — a sceptical look at supergraphics in architecture, and what happens when the wall becomes a low-resolution screen. (143 characters)
• Target keywords: supergraphics architecture, media façade, projection mapping buildings, LED building screen, history of supergraphics

Headline alternatives

1. Supergraphics, or How Buildings Learned to Shout
2. The Wall That Became a Screen: A Short History of Supergraphics
3. From Ravenna to Times Square: The Supergraphic Problem
4. When the Façade Has a Feed
5. Buildings That Only Exist After Dark

A note on the style and the facts

I’ve leaned into McKay’s signature moves — the deadpan definition, the historical reach-back that implicates the reader, the categorisation that turns into an argument, and the closing aphorism. A few specifics I invented or asserted that you may want to verify or swap for your own references: the attribution of 1960s supergraphics to Barbara Stauffacher Solomon at Sea Ranch (accurate but worth a citation if this is going to a knowledgeable architecture audience), and the various location name-drops (Ravenna, Times Square, Tokyo, Seoul) used illustratively rather than from a specific source.

Want me to [grrrr] push the tone further toward McKay’s more savage register, add real footnoted sources, or generate a second illustration contrasting a Byzantine mosaic with the LED screen?