Search the Forum

On October 13, 2016, Boston mayor, Martin J. Walsh unveiled the new LED-based architectural lighting of Boston City Hall. The lighting debut was during this year’s final Beer Garden on the Bricks event, themed “Light Bright Beer Garden.” The city intends the new LED lighting to highlight and enhance the building’s original design and increase public safety. The exterior lighting installation is one among several ongoing initiatives to highlight City Hall and City Hall Plaza and make them more inviting for residents. “I am proud that for the first time in its 48 year history, Boston City Hall is going to shine,” said Mayor Walsh. “This state of the art lighting system will help make City Hall the civic heart of our city by livening up the plaza, while making the area safer and connecting us to Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market. Bringing new light to City Hall is symbolic of a more responsive vision here at City Hall, one that is meant to be engaging, inspiring, and serve as a beacon of the city and our values.” New LED fixtures replaced the original Metal Halide exterior recessed lighting and the existing floodlights that illuminate the building’s lower levels and accentuate the entrances. The new fixtures cover the building in a warm white light, and they can produce a broad range of colors. Such color options can allow the City to light the building to acknowledge a variety of celebratory and public events. The mayor lit the building blue to recognize the police officers injured in East Boston, and as a further demonstration of its light changing capability, the mayor changed the color to pink in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The pink lights at city hall added to pink lighting of numerous buildings and landmarks around the city. The lighting highlights the original three-part design of City Hall. The lower levels house the public spaces of the building. The symbolic spaces including the middle sections hold the offices of the Mayor and the City Council, and the administrative spaces crown the building and house the administrative functions of government. According to the city, the new exterior lighting improves security lighting. The city says that the system allows for the floodlights and associated conduit added to the building over the years to be entirely removed. “By illuminating its iconic and bold form, City Hall’s interaction with Boston’s urban fabric may be reinvigorated,” said David Eisen FAIA, Boston Society of Architects/AIA (BSA) Vice President for Communications. “It’s a decisive step toward transforming one of the most internationally renowned buildings that make up our distinct architectural heritage.” The new fixtures are more energy efficient than the Metal Halide fixtures and the existing Flood Lights that they replace. The LED lighting is expected to save the city about 300,000 kWh of electricity annually compared to the replaced lights. The LED technology has a projected 20-year lifespan compared to the 4-year life of the metal halide lights that the LED system replaces. The City expects additional savings from the cost of maintenance and light replacement. Arcade lights have also been retrofitted with LED lighting to complement the new City Hall lighting. The same controller will be able to operate and coordinate both the arcade lights and the City Hall lights. “It is wonderful that the City is taking this opportunity to recreate its own home place – City Hall – as the keystone and central event in an ongoing pursuit of improved illumination for our city,” said Todd Lee, President of LIGHT Boston. Based on materials from boston.gov

1000-Watt LED Floodlight Provides Fantastic Nighttime Video Effects Along with drone technology and the advancement of user-modified drones, another thing that has also been evolving is LED technology and the way people use it. In this four-minute video, you will see a good example of the combination of these two technologies, as Stratus Productions mounted a 1000-watt LED light to a Freefly Systems Alta 8 drone. The story of building the 1000-watt LED bar started last year, and in this video, it is attached to a drone for its first flight. As it's told in the video, with some battery modification, both the drone and the LED bar can run for about ten minutes. Taking the required power into consideration, ten minutes of running time sounds miraculous. In addition to lighting aerial videos at night, this experimental system (or builds similar to this system) can also be used for a variety of other purposes, from lighting subjects at any time of the day when shooting from the ground to aiding in search and rescue activities. If you have any LED-based custom-modification experience with drones, please share it with us in the comments below. For some gorgeous sample footage shot with this rig, skip straight to the two-minute mark in the video.

2017 will mark the 50th anniversary of The Summer of Love. To celebrate, Illuminate founder and CEO Ben Davis wants to transform Market Street into a rainbow of multicolored lights from Embarcadero to Van Ness. From the same non-profit that brought us the Bay Lights, the new LED project, Lightrail, will consist of a two-mile long stretch of luminous cables that will run 18 feet above the street, reflecting the real-time movement of BART and Muni trains in the subway tunnels below ground. Strips of LEDs would extend from existing utility poles up the length of Market Street from the Embarcadero to the Castro, showing swiftly moving flashes of color each time a BART or Muni train exited a station underneath the street, with different colors indicating the different lines. The installation has already been approved to last for four years, with a proposed budget of $12 million. Illuminate hopes to raise at least $10 million in private philanthropy, much the same way they raised funds, twice, to install and then re-install the Bay Lights. "Once we've collected all the money, it would take six months to built the Lightrail" added Davis. Georges Zisiadis and Stefano Corazza are the local artists behind the installation. Davis met Zisiadis after a celebration for the Bay Lights and was amazed by the idea of LightRail. "This is as important as Bay Lights or maybe more important," said Davis at an event last week. "We want this to be a provocation to people to continue down Market Street." With Lightrail, Illuminate also plans to retrofit the historic Path of Gold streetlights, from the Ferry Building to the rainbow flag in the Castro, with new energy-efficient LED bulbs that will cut energy use by 80%. // To know more about Lightrail and ask for a private demo visit illuminate.org or lightrail.org

LED Street Lights May Be Damaging To Your Health LEDs are replacing yellow street lamps in an attempt to save energy. But medical experts say LEDs could be damaging to our health Health authorities had issued warnings about LED street lighting. Yellow street lights are being replaced by white LED (Light Emitting Diode) lights to save energy. But according to the American Medical Association (AMA), LEDs could be damaging to our health, affecting sleep and vision. In an official statement, which was adopted unanimously at the AMA's annual meeting in Chicago earlier this month, the AMA addressed issues about the new LED street lighting in the country.