Lichen Street Light Pole
Street lights, like other furniture of the street, exist in vast numbers as a network of disconnected sites throughout the city. In themselves they are wanderers, collecting the residue of their subjective interactions within their localised environment. As a network, they connect these different sites as a map.
The Lichen Street Light Pole was an entry into the City Lights competition - designing a new Street Light for New York. Each street light has a central steel structural column wrapped in fifty millimetres of porous concrete. The casting relief of the concrete was to be formed as folds of clothing. The micro-environments of the cleat within these surfaces provides the differentiated spaces of exposure and enclosure required for the differentiated growth of lichen. This porous surface is seeded with algae, yeast and micro-nutrients to promote the growth of lichen. Through urban time, particular lichen species would clothe the pole in response to the localised environment. Lichens are symbiotes of an algae and fungus. They are the pioneers of life in even the harshest conditions, inhabiting all types of environments across the earth. Absorbing nutrients from the air, they absorb also its pollution, air borne contaminants including; carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, heavy metals and radioactive materials. This absorption of localised air promotes particular lichen species to proliferate at the expense of others, their particular colours, forms and aspects providing a visual and also scientific indicator of the air quality within the localised environment of the street. As a collected and interactive network, the differences between each street light begin to differentiate different parts of the city.
The project utilises the distributed and networked topology of the street light to visually reveal the local environment and air quality. Given the different environments we find throughout a city, each Lichen Street Light Pole would express themselves differently, while some from entirely different locations might find themselves to be self similar. Street furniture is typically designed to remove all sense of time and place (ageless and generic), no wonder the city barely understands the changing climate.
