With the L.A. Lights the Way competition, city officials hoped to find a new design for L.A.’s standard streetlights. The winning entry offers a modular design that can be customized to include shade, benches and new technologies.
The winners are L.A.-based studio Project Room and their entry, “Superbloom.” According to Project Room, the key is to think of each streetlight as “a bouquet” — hence the name Superbloom. Roadway lights, pedestrian lights and telecommunications equipment get their own steel or aluminum tube, bundled together to create a single unit. This way, you can add other features as you need them.
Christopher Hawthorne, chief design officer for the City of Los Angeles, called Project Room’s entry a “clear standout.”
“What’s most impressive about it is that it’s not a single, fixed design but instead a family of forms that can be reconfigured in nearly endless ways,” he said in a statement. “That adaptability will serve to future-proof the design, giving it flexibility in accommodating new technology as it arrives.”
As part of the competition, applicants had to consider how streetlights could incorporate new technology, feature enough space to display text on each pole and provide shade. Project Room will receive $70,000 in prize money, while Superbloom lamps will replace 180,000 standard lamps across the city. The Bureau of Street Lighting installs between 1,000-2,000 of these per year.
Standard lamps, notably, do not make up all of the streetlights in the city. All of our beautiful historical lamps will stay right where they are.
Fun fact! Project Room’s previous projects include the benches at MOCA.