Weekly Wrap-up: City Lighting and Green Roofs

Excellent post today by Richard Layman in his blog Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space on Lighting as an element of urban design and community identity.

The six categories of light:

• urban lighting (streets, public areas)
• buildings and objects



American Sign Museum in Cincinnati

• art (indoor and outdoor)
• events and festivals
• information
• advertising

Among Layman's many examples of creative urban lighting to support urban design goals are:  church steeples, rivers, erecting a chandelier in a theater district, neon entries like Reno's, illuminations in Calgary and lighting master plans in cities like San Diego and Mayor Rahm Emanuel's initiative to use architectural lighting in the "City of Light" to boost tourism.  

This last is controversial after the International Dark Sky Association took it to task.  For me that has to be the last word because protecting wildlife, as the DSA does, always trumps architecture in my book.

Thank you, Richard, for a thought-provoking piece.

And at Inhabitat this week, mcdonalds-goes-green-in-singapore with a vegetative roof designed to provide space for local wildlife and on Sauvie Island near Portland,  this 540-square-foot-oregon-home provides home for a family of four and sports a lush green roof.  Originally worker housing from the flooded shipyard worker village of Vanport, the cottage was floated down the river to its current resting place, where it shares the 5-acre property with a large green house, chickens, beehives and more as the family continues its journey toward self-sufficiency.

Sauvie Island 540 square foot green house

McDonald's, Singapore