Northern Lights: How 3 Cities Brightened Up the Long Winter Nights

The über-creative cities of Montreal, Amsterdam and New York have no shortage of truly original eye-catching public-art installations, naturally. And when the holidays roll around, the cities’ special temporary installations become all about lighting up the night. While the three regions have just recently packed up their winter-season illuminated works, we revisit the innovative concepts they showcased and how each were executed. MONTREAL Loop by Olivier Girouard, Jonathan Villeneuve, Ekumen, Ottoblix and Generique Design For the seventh year, Montreal’s Luminothérapie dominated the city’s Quartier des spectacles (Entertainment District) with a light and sound celebration that invited pedestrians to interact with and, in a sense, control the main attraction. For the 2016 – 2017 edition, the winter festival presented Loop, an installation of 13 structures that took inspiration from the old-fashioned optical toy known as the zoetrope. Photography by Ulysse Lemerise/OSA Images Conceived by Olivier Girouard and Jonathan Villeneuve, and then produced by Generique Design, Ekumen and Ottoblix, Loop beckoned visitors to sit inside one of 13 wheels, grab hold of a bar lever reminiscent of railway handcars and then crank back and forth as in a rowing exercise machine to reveal illuminated, 20-second-long fairy-tale animations to ...
more on Architizer