Building Projection Mapping for Towers, Hotels and Venues

A building facade is a screen no one on the street can miss. We turn towers, hotel facades and venue exteriors into moving canvases for brand launches, celebrations and public shows, with content built to fit every ledge, window and column.

Lumen & Forge is a Las Vegas-based creative technology and immersive experience company, and we take facade shows from first idea to the last night on site. If you have a building and a date in mind, tell us about your facade project and we will scope it with you.

Building projection mapping is not a picture thrown at a wall. The content is drawn to the exact shape of the structure, so light lands on the architecture instead of spilling across it: a window frame can glow, a column can crack open, a whole tower can turn into a product.

That fit starts with measurement. Complex methods such as photogrammetry can be used to create an accurate 3D rendering of the projection surface before content production begins. Our designers then animate on that model, so the show is built for the real building rather than a flat rectangle, and the alignment on the night is a matter of calibration, not guesswork.

Lumen & Forge covers the full lifecycle of an immersive project: creative concepting and event design, 3D animation and custom content production, technical engineering, hardware procurement, and live-event execution. On a building, that means:

• Survey and scan. Common capture methods include tripod laser scanning, mobile or handheld LiDAR, photogrammetry from calibrated photos, and drone-based scanning for facades and rooftops.
• Projection design. Large facades demand precise planning around throw distance, lens selection, surface material, ambient light, and viewing zones.
• Custom content. Our animation and visual storytelling team builds the show on the scanned model of your building.
• Blending and brightness. Edge blending lets several projectors behave as one image, and we plan the overlap zones, often 15 to 33 percent of each image.
• Weather and rigging. For outdoor shows we build what the site needs, from scaffold towers to climate-controlled projector enclosures.
• Crew on the night. Our in-house team spans creative directors, animators, projection engineers, and on-site technicians.

The building sets the plan. A tall tower viewed from across a city needs long-throw lenses and a lot of light: outdoors and on buildings, it is common to use multiple 20,000 to 50,000 lumen projectors and often stacked for brightness. A hotel facade brings its own limits. On the Radisson Hotel in Salt Lake City, the unique orientation of the building made the aspect ratio a challenge, so our team mounted the projectors on 40ft of scaffolding.

Smaller buildings follow the same method at a different scale. At the Chabad of Summerlin, our technicians set up two 4K projectors at opposite sides of the synagogue and edge-blended them to reduce shadow on the building.

Some buildings have their own pages. Monuments and civic icons are covered on landmark projection mapping, and heritage sites on historic building projection. For ornate columns and arches, see 3D architectural mapping, and for multi-projector, city-scale shows, see large scale projection mapping.

• Tropicana world record. In 2022 we projected a live multiplayer video game across the Tropicana, recorded as 47,397 square feet and beating the previous world record by over 8,000 square feet.
• Nike Air Jordan at the 2023 NBA All-Star Game, Salt Lake City. With Elite Media Inc., we covered the Radisson Hotel outside the Vivint Arena with a display of over 40,000 square feet and four climate-controlled weather enclosures.
• Don Julio 1942 on the Stratosphere, Las Vegas. In February 2024, during Super Bowl week, we projected onto the south and east faces of the tower with 63 high-powered projectors of 30,000 lumens each, for 4 nights from 7 pm to 2 am.
• Texas Tech centennial. For the university's 100th anniversary in February 2023, seven 4K Barco projectors on custom truss turned the Administration Building into a 5-minute show built from archival media and new motion graphics.

See all our projects.

Send us the address of the building, your show dates, and who you want to reach, and we will come back with a plan for surveying, projection and content. You can also browse our other projection mapping services, or go straight to contact us to book a call.