Food market to feature world’s largest graphics

by all | 16 July 2014 10:30 am

[1]Although it is not scheduled to open until October, a new open-concept food market in the Netherlands will showcase enormous dye-sublimated ceiling and wall graphics that have already earned the facility the nickname of ‘the Sistine Chapel of Rotterdam.’

The Rotterdam Market Hall was conceptualized by architectural firm MVRDV as a horseshoe-shaped building featuring printed artwork along the inside surface of its arch, surrounding the various food stands and cafés. Graphics totalling 1,022 m² (11,000 sf)—reportedly the largest artwork anywhere in the world—would be visible throughout the entire facility, which also houses a cooking school and more than 200 apartments.

Large-format printing company TS Visuals and Dutch artist Arno Coenen—both based in Rotterdam—teamed up to create the colourful graphics. The resulting work, dubbed ‘Horn of Plenty,’ provides the illusion of fresh produce and flowers descending from heaven into the hall.

Achieving a single, permanent image of such massive size required 4,000 light and flexible metal panels. TS Visuals researched and designed these panels, cut them from 2-mm (0.08-in.) thick aluminum, perforated them for sound-dampening properties and sublimated them with high-resolution graphics and high-gloss coatings for scratch resistance and graffiti-proofing, all in-house.

The company’s colour management department used Wasatch raster image processor (RIP) software to ensure the visual consistency of the project, in terms of both reproducing desired colours across the panels and matching spot colours. The software’s tiling tools were used to divide the artwork into 4,000 components, while nesting tools maximized the layout of the tiles, with crop marks and annotations added to avoid confusion when transferring the imagery. Each panel also received a unique code on its rear surface, for sorting purposes.

“The tiling and nesting saved us a lot of time,” says Vincent Post, commercial advisor for TS Visuals.

Given the flexibility of the panels, many were bent to accommodate the arch of the ceiling and to emphasize three-dimensional (3-D) effects. Finally, Aldowa Plaatwerek mounted them all into place, in what is reportedly the Netherlands’ first-ever indoor food market.

[2][3][4]

 

 

Source URL: https://www.signmedia.ca/food-market-to-feature-worlds-largest-graphics/

---