When you walk into Berczy Square at 33 Yonge Street in Toronto, you are greeted by a boulder-shaped front desk flanked by pillars resembling vast tree trunks. Inside, the lobby evokes a Zen-like greenhouse, with hanging moss pendants over a reflecting pool, a vapour-based fire pit, and a trellis full of cascading greenery that wraps the elevator bay’s travertine wall up towards the atrium.

Anchoring the trellis is a towering, 27.4-m (90-ft) direct-view LED (dvLED) screen that guides visitors’ eyes up to the sky. The nine-storey display shows a series of four generative art capsules created by Montreal-based multimedia studio Gentilhomme that evolve based on the weather, time of day, and sports schedule.

As more Canadian workers return to working in the office, Class A commercial office buildings need to offer tenants more than when 33 Yonge first opened in 1982.

Commutes are longer, working from home became the norm, and employees, especially younger ones, often live with family or in small spaces. They need more places in the city—“third spaces”—to meet, network, and socialize before and after work.

Berczy Square offers something other offices do not: One of the tallest indoor dvLED screens in North America. The screen is not just a display, but an integral part of the architecture that sets the tone for the wider design vision.

The office rebound

GWL Realty Advisors (GWLRA) is a Canadian real estate investment advisor. As an office landlord, we realized we need to “earn the commute” by designing spaces and amenities that make employees want to come to the office.

Two years ago, we started reimagining 33 Yonge as Berczy Square, with new restaurants, new retail, and a hotel-like new lobby. In other words, a destination. The investment paid off: Berczy Square is now 96 per cent leased.

Pause, and look up

To reimagine our lobby, we turned to Alison McNeil, a partner at Toronto-based architecture firm DIALOG, who redesigned the lobby and bar at Toronto’s Four Seasons Hotel. The new Berczy Square needed to balance hospitality and productivity while creating a distinctive connection between the Financial District and the iconic Berczy Park in Old Town.

“The lobby at Berczy Square represents a shift in how the office building has evolved,” says McNeil. “No longer simply a place to pass through, we’ve reimagined the lobby as a destination for gathering and connection—a space that reflects both the building’s location and identity.” The screen highlights the atrium architecture, the only one of its kind in the Financial District that’s accessible to the general public. “We call this design concept Pause because it invites people to slow down, look up, and take a moment to breathe,” McNeil adds.

An architectural element

The display’s content does not simply function as wayfinding or advertising. Like architecture, it shapes how people experience the lobby, influencing how they move, where they pause, and where they look.

“We approached the screen as an architectural element rather than a display surface,” says Thibaut Duverneix, founder and executive creative director of Gentilhomme. “The goal was to create something that lives with the building, a form of atmospheric content that reveals itself over time.”

Developed for an audience that passes through the building daily, the digital display must draw viewers in and hold them without the content feeling overly repetitive or creating visual fatigue. The images are calming, unfolding gradually to seamlessly become part of the rhythms of the lobby’s comings and goings.

From concept to screen

With the design strategy in place, our next challenge was to build and install this unusually shaped indoor screen.

Our first call was to Samsung to develop a screen that is nearly 1.9 m (6.3 ft) wide and more than 27.4 m (90 ft) tall. Based on the shape, this would be more complex than a standard aspect ratio. Samsung said it was possible, so we went with the Samsung IFR series, an indoor, direct-view screen featuring advanced LED HDR with brightness up to 2,400 nits and 3,840Hz refresh rates.

Some key numbers:

• 18,360 pixels tall
• More than 23.5 million pixels total
• Five synchronized controllers fed from one video source

A ‘spaceship’ server

In April 2024, we engaged Doing Things Simply Inc (DTS), a Toronto-based company that specializes in integrated corporate AV solutions, to oversee the technical delivery of the project in collaboration with Samsung, multimedia studio Gentilhomme, and our installation and construction partners TradeSync and Govan Brown, respectively.

DTS’s role extended beyond the delivery of the dvLED screen. Early in the process, the team helped underscore the importance of content and sound as integral components of the overall experience, introducing multimedia studio Gentilhomme and shaping how the visual and audio elements could work together within the space.

To support this, DTS designed and integrated a discreet audio system using Fohhn linear directional speakers, selected for their ability to deliver even, controlled sound while remaining visually unobtrusive. The speakers were custom-painted to blend seamlessly into the architecture. GWLRA also partnered with Bellosound to curate a musical program that evolves throughout the day, complementing the generative artwork and reinforcing the calming, immersive atmosphere of the lobby.

“Our intent was to support a complete experience,” says Gavin Bridge, managing director at DTS. “The technology, content, and sound all needed to work together in a way that felt natural to the space, not layered on. We had to take the usual 16:9 format, split it into sections, and stack them on top of each other into essentially five half 16:9 screens that would work seamlessly together,” he adds.

Another major factor influencing the installation was the generative content, which means it evolves in real-time in response to pre-programmed variables.

Gentilhomme was engaged in September 2024, a month prior to construction. To allow the screen to display real-time changes at such a large scale, we installed a massive PIXERA media server behind the screen. It resembles a spaceship and requires a lot of processing power.

The timeline

• Screen construction starts: October 13, 2025 (video installation begins)
• Screen construction ends: November 26, 2025 (video wall installation completed)
• Final content testing: March 2, 2026
• Lobby opens to the public: March 21, 2026

A screen within a trellis

One of our goals with the new lobby was to ensure all renovations were “soft interventions” that preserved the original architecture, like the travertine wall behind the screen.

The steel trellis structure that surrounds the screen was designed to prevent any damage or penetration of the existing travertine cladding on the elevator column. That introduced big complexities into the load and design of the steel.

The screen, designed to be as hidden as possible, was then built on top of the trellis within an exoskeleton that wraps around it. There are two side gables, and metal stud floor-to-ceiling structural framing that supports the screen at each level like a rib cage.

We made sure everything is perfectly aligned from a depth perspective all the way up. Any error would be noticeable to viewers. As construction was underway, the team was constantly checking measurements because there are no do-overs in this type of install.

“We’re installing in an active construction site,” explains Bridge. “There were always multiple trades in the space working simultaneously on different aspects of the lobby renovation. The team did a lot of climbing to bring materials up.”

“We also had to test in sections, from top to bottom,” he continues. “We didn’t want to get too far down and realize colour patterns and sequences were not working above. All in all, it was an amazing team of people that worked together.”

The heartbeat of Berczy Square

On March 21, 2026, the lobby opened to the public with an official grand opening event taking place a month later. Depending on the day, visitors will see one of four art “capsules” that Gentilhomme produced.

“The artwork is the heartbeat of Berczy Square,” explains Gentilhomme’s Duverneix. “It responds to the city and the rhythm of the people within it.”

The content responds to a constant flow of data, such as the time, the weather, the seasons, and sports games happening in Toronto on a given day, causing the images to morph and trigger “Easter eggs.”

The four capsules include Living Architecture, the hero piece: a tree that grows by the hour and transforms with the seasons; Breach of Light offers an ambient, hypnotic flow of continuous movement; Mirror of Time presents a calm, passive, dreamlike sky; and Surreal Hourglass is the most literal timekeeper, with a parkour for descending balls that mark the passing hours.

The future

We did several weeks of content testing prior to the lobby’s unveiling to ensure the images displayed seamlessly. DTS is now working on a web-based controller that will take the complexity out of updating the pre-scheduled screen content for GWLRA.

“Our goal is to have GWLRA become fully self-sufficient,” says Bridge. “They can adjust levels up and down without having to log into servers. We’re in the background if they need us.”

There will also be quarterly maintenance checks. If repairs are needed, there’s a monorail system installed 27.4 m (90 ft) above the lobby that requires a lucky maintenance tech to hang from a bosun chair, kind of like a high-rise window washer.

This achievement would not have been possible if we had not brought all the various companies together—the interior architecture firm, the content producers, the installers, and the construction team—early on.

Dillon Quinn is a project manager at GWL Realty Advisors, with experience delivering projects across industrial, office, and residential asset classes in Ontario. His portfolio includes work such as industrial warehouses in Bolton and Richmond Hill, residential townhomes in Oakville, and the Berczy Square office renovation, among others. Known for his collaborative approach, Quinn served as owner’s representative on Berczy Square, leading design, approvals, and construction while guiding projects from concept through successful turnover.