The Magasins Generaux, in Pantin near Paris, was a vast abandoned building for about ten years before it became the future headquarters of the Parisian advertising company BETC. The building became iconic for being almost entirely covered with graffiti artwork and for hosting many works of art from famous artists from around the world. Before the building’s restoration, BETC decided to pay homage to the history of the space by creating a virtual replica of the building and its art pieces.
Graffiti General is an immersive webGL plunged into an abandoned building near paris and the countless graffiti artworks that it enshrines. On the eve of its restoration, the memory of the building in its current state was preserved and accessible to everyone. Graffiti General was made possible thanks to a combination of the very latest technologies: webGL and threeJS on a html5 page. 20,000 m2 were thus 3D-modelled and 5200 photos, the greatest amount of textures ever used in a webgl project, were color corrected and integrated into the 3D model.
BETC Digital, 2014