Merit Award
Chroma Streams: Tide and Traffic
Glasgow
Glasgow City Council
JM Architects
Leni Schwendinger Light Projects Ltd.
Leni Schwendinger (artist), Chuck Cameron
(project manager)
James Young Ltd. Northern Light (installation);
Mott MacDonald (structural engineers); Normand
& Thomson Ltd. (stainless steel light standards);
Glasgow Development and Regeneration Services, Glasgow Land and Environmental
Services (owner agencies)
Glasgow City Council and Marin Hunter
Chroma Streams: Tide & Traffic is a site-specific,
integrated artwork for the highly trafficked
Kingston Bridge in Glasglow, Scotland. The installation was one of many
commissioned by the Glasgow City Council as part of its municipal lighting
strategy. The artist’s challenge lay in addressing the bridge’s
highly visible but aesthetically unappealing structural materials. The
project’s premise is focused on the two tides represented by the
river and the traffic above it, and the bridge’s underside and its
riverine reflection were selected as the “canvas” for the
illumination.
Two monumental concrete arcs make up the bridge. Directly under the bridge,
two sleek, stainless-steel standards (approximately 6 meters high) comprise
the installation’s daytime sculptural elements and direct light
in a number of ways to illuminate and give resonance to the bridge’s
overlooked surfaces.
Chroma Streams is a syntactical structure into which chance patterns of
traffic and the predictable tidal cycles of the River Clyde are visually
presented and interpreted through a changing montage of colored light.
A linear color pattern based on the cool end of the spectrum—ranging
from light green to indigo—represents the four distinct cycles of
the river’s flow. Traffic enginers graded traffic flow above the
bridge into several modes based on speed and volume, and these flows are
represented in a palette of six colors on the warm end of the spectrum,
from a clear yellow to a strong red/pink. Via sensors installed on streetlight
standards, real-time traffic flow data are transmitted to the lighting
apparatus and downloaded into a computer program. This programming allows
for 144 sequences of discrete color mixes.
The challenging budget of $400,000 was stretched by significantly involving
city-employed traffic engineers in the project and by using a universal
tidal program to determine the light flows on the underside of the bridge.
The minimal quantity of lighting fixtures (12) for the huge bridge canvas
was determined with sustainabiliy and budget in mind.
As traffic pours into and out of the Glasgow city center, an interactive
lighting spectacle feeds back nighttime rhythms of city circulation to
onlookers and passersby. Relating traffic and tide enables spectators
to contemplate the chance interrelationships between nature and te manmade.
“A night rainbow. Magic. Glasgow sings a colrful opera from the
bridge and it also makes the river dance.”
“What makes this light performance particularly special is that
it blends the pace of the earth, in the form of the tide, with the data
from a city, in the form o bridge traffic, creating an interface where
the natural and the mechanical met.”
“This project takes the forgotten underside of an urban infrastructure
and lyrically animates the structure, the water, and the cityscape. As
a simple lighting scheme alone, it would be delightful. But when activated
by the movement of traffic and water, the bridge dances to the music of
an unseen orchestra.”