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It’s important that people see a place where they’ve always been walking around at night and yet see it with new eyes. It’s an inspiring and enlivening relationship with the city that I’m happy to promote.
On Triple Bridge Gateway
…they folded an aesthetic improvement into the infrastructure budget and it was brilliantly conceived in that manner.
Expanded sustainability
We have to be concerned with energy use but we also have to add to our sustainable precepts the vital health of people congregating and using the city streets at night.
On HTO Park
Early on in public lighting history, there were moonlight poles. In Austin, they use super-high moonlight poles and just use a few lights to cover a large area. I think it’s a good approach to save energy and keep technology out of the way of park users.
About collaboration for Dreaming in Color, McCaw Hall
It really was a true collaboration — the design team included architects, landscape architects, scenic designer (an opera designer who would work at the McCaw Hall), engineers, stakeholders, and owners. We all worked together and did presentations to each other in a brainstorming style. It was an exciting kind of mind meld.
Effective strategies for smart growth
We’re on the verge of a new lighting discipline, a melding of lighting and urban design, which I call public design. Public design is an exploration of environmental lighting design at night. One of the great options we’re now getting to use in the U.S. is lighting control, which allows us to really interact with light in a more direct way. We can brighten the street lights at certain hours, dim the street lights at other hours, and look at it as an economic development tool. We can decide Main Street will be brighter or dimmer at certain hours. Community groups can define what the right time is to make that light brighter and dimmer. That interaction with the communities is very important. Lighting and the communities that we are lighting should be connected in this way.
Energy Saving and sustainable technology
I’m telling you right now IES committees are debating how much light is needed for any particular city or any district. You’re going to find some people who say let’s bring the light down. You can also find people in inner cities where you’re just building a park for the first time saying give me some light so I can play, give me more light, I want to recognize that person as they come toward me. It’s not an easy answer. We have to be concerned with CO2 emissions. We have to be concerned with energy use but we also have to add to our sustainable precepts the vital health of people congregating and using the city streets at night.