Project Room’s Winning Streetlight Design Beckons a Brighter Future for Los Angeles
The L.A.-based collective brings the city its first new streetlight design in more than 60 years.
The L.A.-based collective brings the city its first new streetlight design in more than 60 years.
In November 2019, Los Angeles’s chief design officer Christopher Hawthorne teased a design contest to update a swath of the city’s some 223,000 streetlights. "For one winning design team," he told Dwell’s chief editor William Hanley, "it will be an opportunity to really make a mark across the entire city."
The design by L.A.–based Project Room, Superbloom, was chosen for its flexibility. "What’s most impressive is that it’s not a single, fixed design, but instead a family of forms that can be reconfigured in nearly endless ways," says L.A.’s chief design officer Chris Hawthorne.
Courtesy of Project Room
What Hawthorne didn’t anticipate from the L.A. Lights the Way contest was that out of 110 international entries, the winning team would, serendipitously, come from L.A. "It validated our decision to hold a competition, because this is not the kind of proposal or office that we would have found through the usual process," he said to Los Angeles Times last week.
Project Room, an L.A.–area collective comprised of artists, curators, architects, and designers, was announced the winner on Thursday by a panel of six experts in the fields of architecture, city planning, public works, and design. The panel’s rubric? According to Norma Isahakian, the recently retired executive director of the city’s Bureau of Street Lighting, they wanted something iconic, and something that would unify the city’s districts in anticipation of the 2028 Summer Olympics.
Elegant and timeless, the expanding, plant-inspired design nods to the past while looking toward the future.
Courtesy of Project Room
An artists rendering conveys a use case in an L.A. neighborhood, where two offset poles cast broad and varied light. At the top, a rainbow of LED lighting provides ambiance, and can alert of an emergency.
Courtesy of Project Room
See the full story on Dwell.com: Project Room’s Winning Streetlight Design Beckons a Brighter Future for Los Angeles
