City Lights Design Competition

[Kris]

New York City's Department of Design and Construction, in partnership with the Department of Transportation, is pleased to announce an international design competition for a new streetlight for the City of New York. The City of New York has provided lighting for the city's streets since 1762. New York City currently maintains over three hundred thousand streetlights within its five boroughs, and is seeking a new streetlight design for the city in the twenty-first century. The city intends to add the new design to the Department of Transportation's Street Lighting Catalogue, continuing a tradition of innovative street lighting begun more than two centuries ago.

COMPETITION GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

The goal of this competition is to select a new streetlight design for the City of New York. The winning design and its variations will be used to light streets, sidewalks, and parks within the city's five boroughs. The design challenge facing the competitors is to create an innovative, state-of-the-art design that responds to the unique diversity of the city's architecture and urban landscape while meeting the technical performance standards for a New York City streetlight.

The City of New York is sponsoring this international design competition as the best means to achieve the following objectives:
Seek out and identify new ideas for public street lighting.

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.

Improve and enhance the New York City streetscape by using the design competition process as a tool for positive change on the urban landscape.

Provide the highest level of design quality for this essential streetscape element while ensuring the security and safety of New York City's residents and visitors.
The City of New York is also interested in the potential of the winning design to become a new street lighting standard for the city. 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.

ELIGIBILITY

This is a two-stage, international design competition. The competition format asks competitors to submit their concept ideas in Stage I, and for a jury to select three competitors who will receive an honorarium to produce more detailed designs in Stage II. Stage I of the competition is open to the entire design community including architects, artists, engineers, landscape architects, planners, urban designers, lighting designers, product and industrial designers, and manufacturers. Recognizing that the apparent simplicity of a streetlight design belies its technical complexity, the Sponsor encourages multi-disciplinary teams to participate. Stage II competitors will be required to include on their team at least one individual licensed to practice structural engineering in the country or state of their residence.

COMPETITION JURY

JUDITH E. BERGTRAUM, First Deputy Commissioner
New York City Department of Transportation

AMANDA M. BURDEN, AICP
Director, New York City Department of City Planning
Chair, New York City Planning Commission

ELIZABETH DILLER, Architect
Diller + Scofidio, New York, NY

PETER EISENMAN, FAIA
Eisenman Architects, New York, NY

PAUL MARANTZ, FIALD, Lighting Designer
Fisher Marantz Stone, New York, NY

GUY NORDENSON, Structural Designer
Guy Nordenson & Associates LLP, New York, NY

ANNE PAPAGEORGE, RLA, Acting Commissioner
New York City Department of Design and Construction

PROFESSIONAL ADVISOR:
RALPH LERNER, FAIA
Ralph Lerner Architect PC, Princeton, New Jersey

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Answers to questions (PDF) from Stage I registrants will be available April 2, 2004. Answers to questions (PDF) from Stage II Competitors will be available July 23, 2004.

REGISTRATION

To register for this competition, submit a completed Registration Form, along with a cashier's or certified check in the amount of $100.00 payable to the NYC Department of Design and Construction. Please mail the completed Registration Form (http://www.nyc.gov/html/ddc/html/citylights/documents/registration.pdf) (PDF) and check to:

City Lights Design Competition
c/o Ralph Lerner Architect PC
306 Alexander Street
Princeton, New Jersey 08540

SCHEDULE

Announcement of Competition: 5 January 2004
Materials Available to Competitors: 1 February 2004
Registration Deadline: 12 March 2004
Stage I Questions Deadline: 26 March 2004
Stage I Answers Posted: 2 April 2004
Stage I Submission Deadline: 14 May 2004
Stage I Jury: 25 May 2004
Stage II Competitors Announced: 28 May 2004
Stage II Site Visit and Briefing: 18 June 2004
Stage II Questions Deadline: 16 June 2004
Stage II Answers Posted: 23 July 2004
Stage II Submission Deadline: 17 September 2004
Stage II Jury: 11 October 2004
Awards Announced: 15 October 2004
Exhibition: To Be Announced

COMPETITOR MATERIALS

(To be available on or before February 1, 2004)

http://www.nyc.gov/html/ddc/html/citylights

[Ninjahedge]

Simple.

First, you need a solid simple base. Although I do not LIKE the concrets cylinder bases, I think they might be one of the better choices so long as we use a decent finish on it. You put in cast iron like they did in Hoboken and within the first week you will have hundreds that were "accidentally" backed into.

Second, I think the slimline designs you see in a lot of Japanese Anime would look really nice. A slim black post, angling up supporting a "swoop" that would hold the "bar of light" at its end.

The main concern on these things should be durability and easy of replacement (expense as well). We don't need a bunch of fancy lights all over that cost an arm and a leg.

Odd that they are thinking of doing such a superficial improvement as this NOW, when we are in the middle of a fiscal crisis... I wonder if they are getting funding from the State and want to use it before it is takein back....

[ZippyTheChimp]

Odd that they are thinking of doing such a superficial improvement as this NOW, when we are in the middle of a fiscal crisis... I wonder if they are getting funding from the State and want to use it before it is takein back....
This doesn't necessarily mean that they are going to replace streetlights that are in good condition, just another style in the inventory.

The only design I hate is the cobra head lamps on the curved poles.
The victorian retro lamps are ok in context, but too overused.

[Kris]

January 18, 2004

NEW YORK STREETSCAPE

The Future Comes Calling for the Corner Lamppost

By DENNY LEE

If anyone asks, it apparently takes more than seven city officials and experts to change a light bulb.

A jury of seven designers and city agency representatives was formed this month as a first step in an effort to replace the cobra-head streetlamps, the standard gray lights introduced in the 1950's.

But that jury is just a first step. Its task is to invite other lighting experts to take part in an international competition to select a modern rendering of the cobra. That shape constitutes about 85 percent of the city's streetlamps, which number more than 300,000.

"We're looking for something innovative and bold and something that looks like it could belong in the 21st century,'' said Tom Cocola, a spokesman for the city's Transportation Department, which is sponsoring the project with the city's Department of Design and Construction.

The competition may seem elaborate, but architects point out that lighting has the power to transform a space.

"We simply don't notice streetlights, but they are one of the most ubiquitous and largest elements of the streetscape," said Ralph Lerner, a professor of architecture at Princeton University who is an adviser to the competition.

Moreover, some critics say the cobra - an octagonal, galvanized steel pole with a lamp shaped like a snake's head - is not fitting for a great city.

"The cobra-head streetlamp looks like an outsized gooseneck desk lamp," said Vanessa Gruen, the director of special projects at the Municipal Art Society. "It might be efficient, but adds no style or grace to our neglected streets and sidewalks."

The jurors, who will judge the entries on aesthetics, cost and the ability to withstand graffiti and other urban elements, include the architects Peter Eisenman and Elizabeth Diller; Paul Marantz of Fisher Marantz Stone, a lighting design firm; and Guy Nordenson, a structural designer.

City representatives are Amanda M. Burden, chairwoman of the New York City Planning Commission, Judith E. Bergtraum, first deputy commissioner of the Transportation Department, and a juror still to be named from the Design and Construction Department.

Three finalists are expected to be announced in May, and the winning entry chosen in October.

With the cobra head facing possible extinction, some people have apparently decided that the time is right to sing its praises.

"The cobra," Mr. Cocola said, "is the most efficient lighting system a municipal government can have."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[ZippyTheChimp]

Forgotten NY Lamp posts (http://www.forgotten-ny.com/LAMPS/STREETLAMPS%20HOMEPAGE/lamphome.html)

Jeff Saltzman's Streetlights (http://streetlights.tripod.com/lumes/)

[Kris]

Putting A Shine On 'The Apple'

By Vera Haller
NYNewsday.com

January 30, 2004, 6:12 PM EST

Slide Show: NYC Streetlights (http://www.nynewsday.com/news/local/newyork/nyc-streetlightsgallery,0,3445341.photogallery)

Streetlights are fixtures in the urban landscape that often don't get much notice.

New Yorkers know that when the sun goes down, they light up, more than 300,000 of them along 5,700 miles of streets.

Sometimes they may hold a traffic light or a sign saying whether or not parking is allowed.

But there are people in city government who do take notice, enough notice to organize an international design competition that they hope will produce the next great city streetlight.

Called "City Lights," the competition is open to designers, architects, engineers, urban planners and the like. Specific criteria for the competition go out Monday and entries will be accepted until May 14. A winner will be announced Oct. 15.

Among the jurors is Paul Marantz, a light designer who was part of a team that designed the "Tribute in Light" memorial that is lit to mark the anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center.

Currently, the city has a mish-mash of streetlight designs -- from the utilitarian steel "Cobra Head" seen along most major avenues to elegant reproductions of 19th century styles often chosen for neighborhoods with an historical flavor such as Gramercy Park or Tribeca.

Manhattan's Chinatown even has its own special "lantern" streetlight that adds to the atmosphere of the neighborhood.

The city Department of Design and Construction and the Department of Transportation, which are sponsoring the competition, stress that the goal is not an immediate, wholesale replacement of all the city's streetlights. Rather, the winning design would be added to the mix, becoming an entry in the DOT's official "Street Lighting Catalogue." When old streetlights needed to be replaced, the new design would be one of the options.

But architect Ralph Lerner, who serves as a professional adviser to the competition, said design submissions would be viewed with an eye toward eventually bringing some kind of unity to what he called the city's "crazy quilt" lighting system.

"The streetscape in New York City's five boroughs is a cacophony of various elements," Lerner said. "There was a general view that it was time to see whether or not we couldn't find a system that would beautify, that was economical and structurally sound and provided the kind of light required by the city in a more energy-efficient way."

Streetlights first appeared in New York City in 1762 when the city began installing oil-burning lamps and paying watchmen to maintain them. Before that, residents were required to keep a light on in front windows as a way to illuminate the streets, according to a streetlight history provided by the city.

Gaslights followed in the 1820s and electric streetlights first appeared in 1880, although they proved unreliable for many years so gaslights continued to serve as backups.

Cast-iron ornamental streetlights became popular around the turn of the century, with the first such models installed in 1892 along Fifth Avenue from Washington Square to 59th Street, according to the city's historical account.

Among the more popular models of that era was the "Bishop's Crook," whose light hung from a curved gooseneck post often decorated with ornamental ironwork.

It wasn't until the late 1950s that the more modern-looking steel "Cobra Head" streetlights were introduced.

Ross Sandler, a professor of law at New York Law School who was the city's transportation commissioner from 1986 to 1990, said there was some community opposition when the city began taking out the old cast-iron streetlights and replacing them with "Cobra Heads," which were taller and brighter than the old models and therefore could be spaced more widely apart.

One woman in particular, Margo Gayle, launched a campaign to save the old streetlights, going around and posting signs on all the ones she could find, Sandler said.

She earned enough publicity that the city left standing the lights that had not already been removed. Some of these are still standing in the Flatiron District near 23rd Street and Fifth Avenue, Sandler said.

Sandler said that during his time as DOT commissioner in the late 1980s, there was a renewed interest in the old streetlights in the form of reproductions, which were popular in the city's historic districts.

"Instead of having industrial looking lights very high up and without integration in the community, streetlights were lower, sculpted objects near the street," Sandler said.

The "City Lights" competition appears to have a more forward-looking bent.

An introduction to the competition posted on the city government's Web site states that the city wants "an innovative, state-of-the-art design that responds to the unique diversity of the city's architecture and urban landscape."

Asked whether any of the historic designs would come into play in the competition, Lerner said: "Historic lamps have their place, however, we're looking forward. We're trying to envision the streetscape of the 21st century."

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.

[krulltime]

#29 is kind of interesting looking...

[Kris]

The New Yorker

DESIGN DEPT.

CITY LIGHTS

by Ben McGrath

February 10, 2004

A proper familiarity with the street lamps of New York requires a sustained interest beginning at an early, pre-self-conscious age—long before the native disdain for tourists kicks in and, with it, the automatic, jaded lowering of the eyes, the tunnel vision. Kevin Walsh, for instance, recalls his parents taking him on exploratory boyhood bus rides around Bay Ridge, in the early sixties. “I would sort of imitate the lampposts as they went past me,” he said last week. “I would take a pencil and a spoon and a small light bulb from a flashlight, and make my own little lampposts. I did this until I was six or seven.” Jeff Saltzman, over in Rego Park, was three years old when he first started “noticing the lights,” as he put it. Instead of making 3-D models, he made drawings, “like little candy-cane figures with balls attached.” Walsh and Saltzman, who are both now in their mid-forties, are perhaps the most knowledgeable street-lamp buffs in town.

There are more than three hundred thousand street lights in operation in the city today, and—this will be news even to most locals—some thirty-five to forty models, with names like Bishop’s Crook, Lyre, Reverse Scroll, and Davit Pole. (During the Depression, there were nearly eighty different types, fewer than twenty of which have been preserved.) It’s a thrilling time, in any event, to be a street-light enthusiast: last week, an international competition to design a new, citywide lighting standard, fit for the twenty-first century, began in earnest. It marks the first major call for original street-light design in New York in almost fifty years, since the Art Moderne inspiration of Donald Deskey (the designer of the Crest toothpaste tube and the interior of Radio City Music Hall) gave us the “cobra-head” modules that now lean, more like brontosauruses than like snakes, over so many of the city’s avenues and streets.

The Deskey cobras, arriving at about the same time as the Jetsons, never quite inspired futuristic awe, and they have long been derided—at least, by those who regularly risk looking up while they walk. They lack ornamentation—by design, of course—and seem cheaply made, which they are. (This is not a drawback, in the eyes of the Department of Transportation.) “I thought they were hideous when I was a kid,” Saltzman said. “I didn’t even want to live on a street with one of them.” The variety most common to his neighborhood featured tapering octagonal poles with curved “quarter loop” masts, or what Saltzman likes to call “Kojak lights,” since they appeared in recurring driving footage from the old Telly Savalas detective show. (This was notable because, as Saltzman pointed out, “Kojak” was filmed in Los Angeles, not Queens.)

Walsh vividly remembers the near-wholesale replacement of cast-iron lamps with Deskeys. “It was a strange, exhilarating, depressing-yet-exciting time to be a six-year-old lamppost fan, back in 1963,” he writes on his Web site, forgotten-ny.com. “My street, Sixth Avenue in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, was lined with the Victorian-era chocolate-colored ‘Corvington’ long-armed mast poles I had grown used to in my short life.” (They look something like a Beaux-Arts hangman apparatus.) And then, suddenly, “the new octagonal-shafted aluminum poles, with their odd greenish-white mercury lights . . . the goosenecked, ungainly specimens . . . proliferated in New York City streets like ragweed.”

In the nineteen-eighties, in a move of seeming atonement, the city embarked on a retro mission, installing neoclassical replicas of the turn-of-the-century cast-irons: Bishop’s Crook imitations (like clerical staffs, with a hanging teardrop-shaped lantern) on Sixth Avenue in the Village; Corvington look-alikes (officially called Type 24Ms) on Columbus; Reverse Scrolls (Type F) on Eighth Street. “When they first started,” Saltzman said, “I thought it was real cute. It’s nice on a few streets here or there to put up a couple of retros, but, for me, the cuteness has worn off. It just goes on and on—it’s overkill.”

One current contestant with old-school inclinations has already sought Walsh’s help. “He asked me to send him a photo of a very old octagonal pole that was on Union Turnpike, in a parking lot, because it still had one of those cup lights attached to it,” Walsh said. (Cup lights were introduced after the Second World War but did not, for the most part, survive the transition from incandescent to sodium-based lamps, in the seventies.) “You know, they replaced that cup light about three years ago, but I managed to snap a photo before they did.”

Walsh isn’t sure exactly what he’d like to see from the new design, but he has an idea about where he might like it to go: on Fifth Avenue, and nowhere else. “You used to have a uniform pole there,” he said. “Originally, it was the cast-iron twin lamps—Fifth Avenue Twins. Then they all went to the Deskey, twin-mast Deskeys. But now Fifth Avenue has become a mishmash of poles. And it shouldn’t. I think Fifth Avenue deserves its own pole. It’s supposed to be the Queen of Avenues.”

Saltzman, meanwhile, is preparing to revise his assessment of the cobra era. “As I get older, I get more functional in my thinking, and less sentimental,” he said. And while he has no particular feelings for the “octa-poles” to which cobra heads are now typically affixed, the original aluminum Deskey models are beginning to seem more appealing as the prospect of extinction arises. “I’m almost like an old-timer getting nostalgic for cast iron,” he said.

Copyright © CondéNet 2004

[Agglomeration]

Sheesh, people seem to have such an evil vendetta against virtually anything from the 1950's and 60's. :roll: I'm not saying that the cobra-heads are decorative and magnificent (they're efficient but banal) but let's hope that they don't start calling for every glass skyscraper built on Park Avenue to be dismantled and replaced with a 'skyline element'. PS: I predict that at least a few of these cobra-heads will be preserved, for there are those who adore them and will fight to preserve them, just as some of the older lights were adored by residents during the 1920's and 30's.

[BrooklynRider]

I could live with them leaving the poles and fixtures as they are, just get rid of those orange-ish lights that cast everything in a sickly glow. I like the white/blue lights. The city needs to dim down overall. You can't see a star in the sky in Manhattan.

[Kris]

New York City's Department of Design and Construction, in partnership with the Department of Transportation, is pleased to announce the Stage II Competitors in the City Lights Design Competition. The Jury met on May 25, 2004 and reviewed 201 Stage I Submissions. The following Stage II Competitors and Alternates were selected:

STAGE II COMPETITORS

ATELIER IMREY CULBERT LLP
Tim G. Culbert
New York, New York

SKIDMORE, OWINGS & MERRILL LLP
Ross B. Wimer
Chicago, Illinois

THOMAS PHIFER AND PARTNERS
Thomas M. Phifer
New York, New York

ALTERNATES

First Alternate:
STAUBACH + KUCKERTZ ARCHITEKTEN
Uwe Kuckertz
Berlin, Germany

Second Alternate:
CHRISTOFF: FINIO ARCHITECTURE
Martin J. Finio
New York, New York

Third Alternate:
LENI SCHWENDINGER LIGHT PROJECTS
Leni Schwendinger
New York, New York

http://nyc.gov/html/ddc/html/citylights/finalists.html

[TLOZ Link5]

I could live with them leaving the poles and fixtures as they are, just get rid of those orange-ish lights that cast everything in a sickly glow. I like the white/blue lights. The city needs to dim down overall. You can't see a star in the sky in Manhattan.

Agreed. Sodium lights are good for gold floodlights, not streetlights.

[Kris]

Winners (http://nyc.gov/html/ddc/html/citylights/winners.html)

[RedFerrari360f1]

If I sneezed this thing would fall over:
http://nyc.gov/html/ddc/html/citylights/images/winners/phifer02big.jpg

[TLOZ Link5]

Geez, the judges must have had to really nitpick when choosing the winners. The differences are extremely small.

I like Phiefer's the best, though. SOM's design has its perks, but I could never imagine those pylon lights inside a park. Yech.

[BrooklynRider]

If those were the top three in the competition, how bad were the losers. I'm not impressed at all, unless I am totally missing something.

[fioco]

Look at the full-size rendering of the winning design that casts a shadow on the brick wall. Is that the shadow of a cobra that's taken up knitting?

[Johnnyboy]

i like the one from skidmore the most out of all. It looks very nice and high tech. Im not too sure though. Are they making all 3 finalists or just first place.

[Jasonik]

The 'winner' has those nice cables for pigeons to sit on and CRAP, POOP, and/or DEFECATE, all over everyone who walks under them.

NICE #@%* JOB IDIOTS!

[BrooklynRider]

Why not go back to gas lamplights <nostalgic sigh>. Imagine this city in THAT glow. Talk about romance and a love affair with New York!

[ZippyTheChimp]

I don't really like any of them, but I agree with the chosen order.

The SOM looks ok as one unit, but a line of them demands too much attention. They look almost silly as double highway units.

The Atelier looks too flimsy, and in the rendering, the building lines converge to "harmonize" with the the curve of the posts. Who are they kidding? Their pylon lamps are depicted in Hudson River Park, and I like them better than the overbig, Triborough decos that they are using.

[TLOZ Link5]

Why, pray tell, would Skidmore be putting their highway lights in New Jersey?

[millertime83]

speaking of street lights, what happened to that new overhaul of NYC street lamps?

http://www.citymayors.com/made4cities/nyc_streetlights.html

I saw about a year ago the new cobra design, and it was kind of interesting.

http://nyc.gov/html/ddc/html/citylights/images/winners/som01big.jpg

[ZippyTheChimp]

http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4410&highlight=lamps+competioion

http://nyc.gov/html/ddc/html/citylights/home.html

[lofter1]

The AIA on La Guardia Place had a mock-up (3/4 size) on view of the winning design this past summer (the photo below is not from that exhibit; I can't find anything regarding the schedule for construction / installation, if any such schedule / plan actually exists):

http://nyc.gov/html/ddc/html/citylights/images/winners/phifer01small.jpg (http://nyc.gov/html/ddc/html/citylights/images/winners/phifer01big.jpg)