A diamond only sparkles when it moves

The Tiffany Aigrette: Tiffany & Co. Fifth Avenue Flagship Holiday Façade New York, 2014 to 2017

For three holiday seasons, the façade of Tiffany’s Fifth Avenue flagship carried a burst of diamonds drawn from the company’s own archive, inspired by the setting created for the Tiffany Diamond at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Four of them rose more than 100 feet up the building, two facing Fifth Avenue and two facing 57th Street. upLIGHT worked directly with Tiffany to bring them to life.

Christopher Young at Tiffany created the shape of the display and selected its lighting devices with the fabricator, YESCO. He then brought us in to work out how the diamonds could animate, and we developed the answer together. Turn a diamond in your hand and the facets catch the light one after another. These diamonds were fixed to a building, so the light had to do the turning. The largest of them held twenty separate lights, each one controlled on its own, so light could chase across the facets the way it travels across a real stone being rotated.

upLIGHT’s contribution

upLIGHT designed the control system that gave each of the display’s 1,939 LED nodes, one for the year of the World’s Fair, its own line of control, the way a marionette has a string for every joint. We programmed six different shows, each built from dozens of intersecting chases and blinking patterns, and the system played them in random order through the day and night. While YESCO fabricated the pieces in Las Vegas, we built the entire façade in pre-visualization and programmed the shows against it, which gave everyone confidence in the result before the display went up on Fifth Avenue. We returned each season through 2017 to reinstall, update, and support it.