City seeks bright sparks - Construction & Design

Real Estate Weekly, Jan 14, 2004

New York City's Department of Design and Construction, in partnership with the Department of Transportation, is holding an international design competition for a new street light 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 street lights within its five boroughs, and is seeking a new street light 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.

The goal of this competition is to select a new street light 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 street light.

The City of New York is also interested in the potential of the winning de sign 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 street light 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 street light.

It 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 1 of the competition is open to the entire design community including architects, artists, engineers,