Archinect - News

Copper thieves keep unplugging LA's 'Ribbon of Light' on the Sixth Street Bridge

2023-12-23T12:00:00-05:00

A large swath of the 6th Street Bridge, known as the “Ribbon of Light” because of its illuminated arches of color across the Los Angeles River, has gone dark. Copper wire thieves are to blame, city officials said, and it’s unclear when the lights for the Instagram-popular bridge will be fixed.

Other notable incidents include a deadly fall and several social media-driven impromptu street takeovers that caused damages to its road surface just weeks after the Michael Maltzan design opened in July of 2022. The damage extends over a third of the bridge.

Councilmember Kevin de León's office personally phoned in the report and says it adds to a total of $500,000 worth of stolen copper within his 14th District. As the LA Times reported, there were no less than 1,200 active copper capers across the city in the past year alone.

Meanwhile, underneath the bridge, an $82 million public space regeneration is underway from Hargreaves Jones.

A solar-powered media façade that ‘consumes only as much energy as it produces’

2023-07-06T11:32:00-04:00

A team comprising iart, AMDL CIRCLE, and Michele De Lucchi has created a ‘zero-energy media façade’ for the Novartis Pavilion in Basel, Switzerland. Combining PV panels and LEDs, the façade is described by the team as “illustrating the potential of organic photovoltaics in architecture.”

Photo credit: iart – studio for media architectures

Photo credit: Laurids Jensen

The façade features 10,000 diamond-shaped solar modules with LED lights embedded within that shine outwards as well as inwards onto the pavilion’s metal shell. The reflection of the metal shell creates a shimmer through the semi-transparent solar modules, resulting in a multi-layered membrane for displaying content.

Photo credit: iart – studio for media architectures

The display only consumes as much electrical energy as it is capable of producing through carbon-based organic solar modules that were custom-made for the project. The modules were ideal for the pavilion’s dom...

Watch Las Vegas’ MSG Sphere light up for Fourth of July debut

2023-07-05T18:11:00-04:00

At 366 feet tall and 516 feet wide, it’s being billed as the world’s largest spherical structure. Its bowl-shaped theater reportedly contains the world’s highest-resolution wraparound LED screen. And its exterior is fitted with 1.2 million hockey puck-sized LEDs that can be programmed to flash dynamic imagery on a massive scale – again, reportedly the world’s largest. It was fully illuminated for the first time Tuesday night to celebrate the Fourth of July.

The venue doesn’t officially debut until late September with the beginning of U2’s special residency. The sphere will blast tunes from its hyper-customizable 164,000-speaker audio system, which somehow can even direct specific languages to certain parts of the audience.

Video courtesy of Sphere/YouTube

Testing of its eye-burning extierior didn’t commence until just last week. In a press statement, Sphere Entertainment SVP Guy Barnett called it “living architecture, and unlike anything that exists anywhere in the world.”

Bird Safe Philly's 'Lights Out' campaign reduces avian collisions with buildings

2023-03-21T19:17:00-04:00

A new avian-friendly program aimed at protecting bird local populations during their spring migratory period is taking off in Philadelphia with the hopes of being applied elsewhere in order to combat a mostly invisible problem impacting the ecological systems surrounding major cities across the world.

The Philadelphia Inquirer recently published an interesting look at the success of the Lights Out Philly initiative, which encourages building owners, businesses, and individuals to turn off or reduce unnecessary lighting, especially during peak migration periods, minimizing light pollution and allowing migrating birds to navigate more safely. The program has shown a 70% decrease in the number of bird deaths caused by accidental collisions with buildings in the Center City area since being inaugurated in April of 2021.

Lights Out Philly is managed under the larger umbrella of Bird Safe Philly, a consortium of interest groups that includes the National Audubon Society and Drexel Univers...

This atlas shows how much light pollution has infiltrated night skies worldwide

2016-06-10T21:08:00-04:00

Where should you travel if you want killer views of the stars unblemished by artificial light?Certainly not the U.S. or Europe, where nearly 100 percent of the population endures some form of light pollution...Italy’s [ISTIL], NOAA, the National Park Service, and elsewhere built one of the most comprehensive atlases of global light pollution to date. They hope their work will set a benchmark for future generations struggling with day blending into night.

You can find the atlas of artifical sky brightness here.

Not-So-Bright Lights, Big City

2014-12-11T14:37:00-05:00

You know how you’re supposed to turn out the lights when you leave a room to save energy? New York City Council member Donovan Richards wants the owners of many of the city’s office buildings to start doing the same—on a much bigger scale. Richards [...] has introduced a bill that would prohibit owners of approximately 40,000 New York commercial buildings from illuminating the interiors or exteriors of their structures once workers have gone home for the night.

Speech-bubble lamps make Montreal street into comic strip

2014-01-02T18:46:00-05:00

Turn Me On Design recently won a competition launched in 2012 by Avenue Mont-Royal with IDEA-O-RAMA—their comic book inspired street lamps that help give the street a bite of personality [...] The lights are meant to induce "a new kind of dialogue that will 'talk to' the perspective of the Avenue." [...] It would be great to see more cities cultivating regional identity through projects like this.

The elemental is always open to re-interpretation.