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What color is your
cultural district?
South Broad Street in downtown Philadelphia looks a bit blue at times. But stick around for a few minutes and its complexion changes — to white, red, lavender, green, yellow, or others colors. That’s because five blocks of Broad Street have recently been equipped with probably the most high-tech lighting program of any city in America.
Nine buildings — on a stretch of South Broad that, because of its theaters, concert halls, art school, and other cultural venues, has been dubbed the “Avenue of the Arts” — now feature choreographed illumination from dusk to midnight (and later on weekends). A synchronized system using LED (light-emitting diode) fixtures causes the buildings’ facades to become brighter or darker and to change color.
“It’s added to the excitement of the area,” says Alfred Borden, president of The Lighting Practice, the Philadelphia-based firm that designed the lighting displays with help from the architectural firm Vitetta. Most of the buildings date to the 19th or early 20th centuries, and have a richness of form and detail that becomes dramatic with the right nighttime illumination. The structures that received LED lighting include the Bellevue hotel, the University of the Arts’ Terra Hall, a retail and condominium building, an office building, a bank building, and two parking garages.
A simpler approach has been used on three other buildings — the Union League of Philadelphia (whose dark brown brick called for white lighting from metal halide fixtures), the Chambers-Wiley Memorial Presbyterian Church (whose religious character also suggested white lighting, also from metal halide fixtures), and the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, which uses metal halide theatrical lights on its front entrance.
On the buildings with LED lighting, the change of color or intensity takes place “mostly in very slow fades,” Borden explains. “You see the building architecturally rendered.” Every 15 minutes, the lighting sequence quickens. “It’s only for about three minutes that we do something very energetic, where the color jumps across the street or it chases down,” he says. Color-changing shows can be programmed for special events, timed for curtain call at theaters, or coordinated in other ways.
“LED gives you infinite possibilities,” says Paul Levy, president and CEO of the Center City District, a business improvement district that organized the $2.1 million initiative with help from a mix of private and public interests, including The Pew Charitable Trusts, William Penn Foundation, The Lenfest Group, Wachovia Foundation, Avenue of the Arts Inc., the state Department of Community and Economic Development, and property owners.
When to say when
A big question for any urban district thinking of using lighting to enhance its appeal is how flamboyant the illumination should be. A constant, rapid-pace show would be frenetic and eventually numbing, Borden says. “This isn’t Las Vegas or Times Square,” Levy says. “We wanted to find an appropriate middle.” What the Avenue settled on was four seasonal palettes of color, plus other color combinations for occasions such as for Valentine’s Day, the Fourth of July, Halloween, and the December holidays.
The fixtures, which are inconspicuous, use Philips Color Kinetics’ ColorGraze Powercore Luminaires, which come in one-, two-, and three-foot lengths and are designed to withstand rain and dust. LED allows designers to concentrate illumination on building surfaces and not put much unwanted lighting into the sky. Energy-efficiency is another virtue. The 421 LED lights on the Avenue of the Arts buildings reportedly use only 24,000 watts an hour, the same rate of consumption as a home clothes dryer. The LED fixtures contain no mercury, and are estimated to last at least 50,000 hours.
American cities have been slower to seize the potential for choreographed lighting displays than cities in Europe and Asia. Cities such as Malmo, Sweden, and Lyon, France, have “lighting directors,” who call on artists to produce lighting schemes for buildings, parks, and other parts of the landscape. In Asia, one of the places that has implemented lighting plans is Putrajaya, the administrative capital of Malaysia.
The Lighting Practice has also designed illumination programs for retail and entertainment or mixed-use centers elsewhere. “Lighting street-level building facades and doorways (the vertical surfaces at pedestrian level) is about 50 percent of the solution for lighting a city street,” Borden says.
This article, with sidebar “Shorter streetlights are better,” is available in the June 2009 issue of New Urban News, along with images and many more articles not available online. Subscribe or order the individual issue.
By Philip Langdon
