A 9-metre ribbon of flexible LED with a half-twist, hung above a reception hall so the picture runs from the outer face to the inner face without a break — built from 720 standard modules, none of them custom-cut.
The client wanted a centrepiece for a corporate reception hall: a double-height space about 28 × 18 m, with a grille ceiling at 13 m and a large LED wall already on the main backdrop. The idea was a band of light hanging in mid-air, in the form of a Möbius strip — the loop with only one side — as a sign of resources that circulate and never run out.
Three conditions came with it. The pitch had to be fine enough, P1.86, for the picture to hold up from the floor below. The ring must not block the LED wall behind it. And it had to hang from the roof structure, not from the decorative ceiling.
A flat LED module is a rectangle. Bend it along its length and it will follow a cylinder; ask it to follow a surface that also twists, and neighbouring rectangles no longer meet edge to edge — every joint opens into a thin wedge. In our first studies for this project, with a conventional cross-section, those wedges reached about 11 mm. At 1.86 mm pitch that is a dark line roughly six pixels wide, visible from anywhere in the hall.
There are three usual ways out, and each one costs something. Tool custom tapered modules: moulds, lead time, and a module nobody else stocks as a spare. Cover the joints with dark separator strips: the picture is cut into slices. Or keep the twist to one short section and leave the rest as a plain hoop: it stops reading as a Möbius strip.
Instead of fitting modules to a shape, we solved for a shape that fits the modules. The ring's centre-line and its twist were computed together, with our own geometry program, under one condition: the whole lit surface must unroll into a single straight, flat rectangle without stretching. A surface like that can be covered by a plain grid of rectangles, with nothing left over.
For this ring the rectangle is 57.6 m long and 0.64 m wide — 180 columns of four standard 320 × 160 mm flexible modules, 720 in total. No module is tapered or cut to a special shape. Over a dozen design iterations — flat bands, triangular and four-sided sections, different heights and ways of spreading the twist — were checked the same way before this one was fixed: whether the ring closes on itself, how hard each module is bent, the clearance to the columns, and how the picture reads from the entrance.
Each module is still bent along its length and turned slightly against its neighbour, more in some places than others. So the tightest stretch of the twist is built first as a 1:1 sample, two or three cabinets long, fitted with modules and lit, before anything goes into production.
On a Möbius strip the outer face and the inner face are the same face. Follow the band once round and you are back where you started, but on the other side; follow it twice and you are home. The display is driven the same way: the whole surface is one canvas of 30,960 × 344 pixels, about 10.65 million, and content is made as one long strip that joins up with itself after two laps. Text in the content goes on the stretches that face the main viewing directions.
The ring is not a frame with a skin. It is 43 sheet-metal cabinets, most of them about 0.65 m long, each shaped to its own piece of the band. The face is 1.5 mm galvanised steel, cut from the unrolled pattern and rolled to shape, and the modules attach to it magnetically. Square tubes run along the four corners of every cabinet and join at the flanges into continuous rings; each cabinet has a diaphragm at mid-length.
Cabinets meet on flat end flanges with bolts and dowel pins. Four of them are hanging-point cabinets with an internal steel frame and a lifting lug welded to a thickened diaphragm, so the load goes straight into the continuous corner tubes. Steel ropes run vertically through the grille ceiling to two steel transfer beams fixed under the roof beams, and every point has its own safety rope.
Before shipping, the whole ring is pre-assembled in the factory and every cabinet numbered. One closing cabinet is left to be made to the measured gap, so the ring closes on site in one go.
The ring is about 9.10 × 9.11 m in plan and rises and falls 1.74 m. It is centred on the hall's main axis, in line with the LED wall, and sits between the two hall columns with at least 1.0 m clearance to each. The lowest point is about 5.5 m above the floor — above the top of the LED wall at 4.75 m — so the wall stays in full view from the entrance and the floor underneath stays open for people. The hanging height can be adjusted on site.
3D model of the ring in the hall; shape, module layout, cabinet joints and hanging points fixed.
1:1 build of the two or three cabinets at the tightest part of the twist — modules fitted and lit.
43 cabinets made, the full ring pre-assembled and every cabinet numbered.
Cabinets joined into the full ring on a ground jig; modules fitted, wired and lit.
Four-point synchronised lift to height, levelled, safety ropes attached.
Calibration, content tests, operator training and handover.
Send a sketch, a reference image or a CAD file with the space it goes in. We work out whether standard modules can cover it, what structure it needs and how it hangs — before you commit to anything.