It’s called the weather tower. And you start to ponder what that means. Yeah, you get the meaning that it is somehow related to the weather, obviously. But how? It forecast the weather? The weatherman (or scantily clad weather girl) lives in it? No, the building tells you the weather, in a colorful way!

Have a glimpse, and you’ll surely think that’s the hippest place in town, and you bet all the town’s best clubs are in there. Well nobody can actually blame you as it is filled with lotsa blink and neon. And you’ll even think that you’re in Vegas! But not, it’s just a normal building that tells the weather. What?

In 2008, The Dexia Tower in Brussels was transformed into a giant weather report. However the concept was an art, therefore the system does not implement simple integers to tell the weather. Instead, the building emits a nightclub style artwork using the LEDs integrated into the windows. Therefore it needs some getting used to in order to interpret what it is trying to tell. Typical artwork, being so metaphoric as usual.

Now, the uniqueness of the project was that a relatively small number of LEDs produced a relatively large-scale effect. There were only 12, 3-color LEDs within each window, but they emitted their light onto window shades. So whereas the LED-equipped Dexia Tower could have been fitted with the pinpointed LED aesthetic of your home entertainment system, instead it resembled something out of Vegas circa 2025.

But here’s a trivia for you. Due to the economic and financial crisis, the lighting of the Dexia Tower has been drastically reduced. Between sunset and midnight the tower lights burn only 10 minutes per hour.

[Dexia Tower via Gizmodo]