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Let There Be Light: NYC Street Light Design Competition

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New York City is holding a competition to design new street lights. Part of their objectives are "Seek out and identify new ideas for public street lighting" and "Obtain the flexibility to apply an integrated streetlight design on a block-by-block, street-by-street, or district-by-district basis within the city's five boroughs"; beyond that, it's more of a mouthful:
The current city standard, introduced almost fifty years ago, consists of variations of a fabricated steel pole and Cobra Head luminaire. It is the city's most widely used streetlight design. The additional design challenge for the competitors is to create an imaginative, cost-effective, and enduring design with the capability, over time, to become the city's preeminent and most widely used streetlight.

How's that for hot? Judges in the competition include architect Peter Eisenman, lighting designer Paul Marantz (who helped design the Tribute in Light), and structural designer Guy Nordenson (who helped figured out the engineering of the redesigned Freedom Tower).

More City Lights Design Competition - Competition Info

Another kind of City Lights: The Charlie Chaplin film.

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Comments [rss]

  • A decorative streetlight that points light downward and not up in the air is definitely the way to go! We should switch from the amber colored light to white light which gives better color rendering and brings out the details of the buildings.

  • MKT

    Light pollution in the NYC area is already overwhelming, but think what this could do for the market in full-cutoff light fixtures... for one thing, New York will need scads of them, and for another, if some funky lights are produced which have Gotham chic and don't wipe out everything below magnitude 1, you just may see dark skies becoming fashionable again.

  • mcdj

    Hehe...they want $100 to submit an idea. Only in New York. Guess that keeps the riff raff like me out of their hair.

  • d

    i don't know whether to admit this publicly or not, but i once spent an hour or two looking at Forgotten NY's streetlamps page. an oddly fascinating piece of americana.

  • Joe Astronomer

    I'm sure people in NYC don't care much about light pollution, but I would favor any design that promotes efficiency and directs light where needed, not up into the sky.

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