Pacific Place is a premier urban shopping destination in downtown Seattle, and it wanted its exterior architecture to feel like a special occasion every evening of the holiday season.

The ask was something that added to the beauty of downtown all winter long, something that could activate an entire city block worth of facade.

NOVA Light Labs answered with holiday projection mapping and custom visuals across the building, luminous themed content that turned a full storefront into a nightly landmark.

Projection mapping gave downtown a reason to look up and the building held the attention of passersby reliably each evening.

What could so easily have been a platform for massive advertisements was instead a canvas for pure art. Creative content matched to the architecture and the season. The crowd gathered, looked up, and held the moment.

In a dense urban environment the effect is tremendous with tens of thousands of impressions every evening.

The content phase struck a rare balance of handmade craft and high technology.

A process of ideation and revision between NOVA and Pacific Place produced a series of scenes that captured the innate possibilities of projection mapping, tuned to their holiday vision. A 3D model of the building anchored a set of analog and digital workflows, a template for generating custom visuals from real world objects.

On the analog side, a literal gingerbread house replica was built and arranged frame by frame, icing and candy set in stop motion.Another scene animated candy canes, wrapping paper, and wreaths along the facade.

Timeless holiday materials, captured by hand and mapped to architecture, the kind of content this medium was made for.

The scale, weather, and geometry called for an indoor installation across the street from Nordstrom to activate Pacific Place.

Across multiple rooms, 6 projectors at 20,000 lumens were networked together to start automatically and play the themed content each evening. Remote access and cameras allowed precise monitoring and adjustment of the show as needed.

Behind a holiday projection mapping show of this scale is a myriad of technical solutions working in concert. NOVA's experience with these systems is what makes successful moments possible on massive architecture like this.