Matthew Gray, then leading interiors at JGN Architecture, asked us to create a lighting installation for the elevator lobby of a new residential building on the Lower East Side. The lobby is a curated art experience built around New York street life, and Matthew had a specific material in mind: salvaged sidewalk vault lights.
We worked with three different vault panels, each lit from behind. The piece takes its cue from the movement of the city. Three scenes cycle through the day. Sunrise and sunset each get a palette drawn from those hours, timed to the day's actual sunrise and sunset. In between, a daytime scene abstracts the rhythm of people walking the streets outside.
The challenge was animating light calm enough to live with every day while still carrying meaning and changing as the day goes on. Dynamic lighting with a story behind it is the work we love most.
A note on the material: vault lights are the glass-studded iron panels still found in older New York sidewalks. Inventor Thaddeus Hyatt patented the system of setting round glass pieces into cast iron sidewalks in 1845, and the lenses let daylight reach the brick-lined vaults beneath city sidewalks, with protruding knobs protecting the glass from wear. Once electricity arrived they fell out of favor, becoming too expensive to maintain, and many have since been removed. At 65 Suffolk, light runs through them again, this time from below.
