* Illustration: Simon Danaher * After half a century of walking their dogs under the same old streetlamps, New Yorkers are ready for a new age of enlightenment. Gotham's own Office for Visual Interaction won an international competition to design a replacement. Its inspiration: LED headlights. "We took the same idea and made it vertical," OVI's Enrique Peiniger says. The new lamppost's 4-to 6-foot head boasts up to 100 LEDs with multiple lenses that can be configured to dial in specific lighting "footprints" of uniform brightness. For New York, the coverage patterns will be tailored for three distinct situations—park, street corner, and mid-block.
Top: Side View
Bottom: Bottom View How many workers will it take to change the bulbs? A lot fewer. LEDs last twice as long as the current high—pressure sodium bulbs. Oh, and they burn 30 percent less energy. Plus, the fixture's modular design makes it easy to swap out chips as LED technology improves. OVI is putting the finishing touches on its prototypes, and if tests go well next year, the lamps will soon start lighting up the city that never sleeps.
Start Previous: Imagining Tomorrow's Browsers - Oh, the Possibilities Next: 15th Anniversary: How General Magic Engineered Our World Jan. 28, 1807: Flickering Gaslight Illuminates Pall Mall
