From a team that says it bases its inspiration "on curiosity rather than on ideology," the Lunar Resonant Street Light is designed to follow the waxing and waning of the moon, brightening and dimming accordingly.
MOONGLOW FOR MODERNS
"Utilizing available moonlight rather than overwhelming it" is the goal of the Lunar Resonant Street Lights design from the artfully named Civil Twilight Collective of designers based in San Francisco. The designers believe that moonlight-sensitive public lighting – designed to dim or even turn off on nights of brightest full-moonlight – could save between 80 and 90 percent of energy normally spent on street lighting. Civil Twilight is Kate Lydon, Anton Willis and Christina Seely, and Willis was the originator of the Lunar Resonant concept. While finishing the graduate architecture program at the University of California, Berkeley, Willis found himself looking for how to have modern developed environments respond to tidal and lunar changes, as he studied the work of American installation artist James Turrell and ancient astronomy-based architecture. (Turrell's "Roden Crater" observatory outside Flagstaff, Arizona, is to open in 2011.) "The difference between sunlight and starlight is something like a hundred thousand orders of magnitude," Willis told MetropolisMag.com. Lunar light at its brightest lies in the midrange of such wide spectrums. What's more, he says, standard street lighting is designed to be only about 10 times brighter than full moonlight, not nearly as intense as might be expected. Willis and his Civil Twilight colleagues hope that implementation of the Lunar Resonant lighting in public spaces can not only save money and energy but also get populations closer to the phases of nature's cycles, returning us to some of the world's ongoing patterns we've begun missing as artificial development rose around us. And Seely, whose work has included photographic studies of some of the brightest cities at night and the illumination they throw off, points out that we could become better sensitized to the value and wonder of electrical lighting, too, by seeing its contrast more clearly to natural moonlight. As Karen E. Steen aptly puts it in MetropolisMag.com, when is the last time Las Vegans saw a star in the sky?
Read more  | LUNAR-RESONANT STREET LIGHTS
| | INDEX:AWARD STATUS: | 2009 Finalist | | CATEGORY: | Community | | ISSUE: | Saving energy in public lighting in a format that reconnects urbanites with natural rhythms of the Earth. | | AWARD NOMINEES: | Kate Lydon, Anton Willis and Christina Seely of the design collective Civil Twilight, San Francisco. | | INFORMATION: | www.civiltwilightcollective.com | |
Written by Porter Anderson |
