The first applications for Shuji Nakamura's bright blue and green light emitting diodes were obvious ones, for the most part extrapolations of existing product trends. Long-lasting, energy-efficient, maintenance-free light emitting diodes had already begun to replace the filtered incandescent bulbs in the red stoplights of traffic signals. Now, LEDs could replace the green go lights, too, cutting the monthly running cost of a set of signals from more than twenty to just a few dollars.1 As we have seen, Cree's dim blue LEDs had already been used in large flat-panel displays for indoor use. Now, with the advent of Nichia's new products in 1996, large-screen displays could be made bright enough for outdoor use, too. For example, the seven-story NASDAQ display in New York's Times Square. This monster screen consists of nearly nineteen million LEDs and covers almost a quarter of an acre, “a new icon for the era of the marketplace, a blue-chip supersign on a once gritty corner.”
But the arrival in the market of high-brightness blue and green LEDs to complete the trinity of primary colors also had less obvious implications, too. These had to do not with the brightness of the lights but with their unprecedented controllability. Light emitting diodes were semiconductor devices, a nice match for other kinds of semiconductor devices, like microprocessors. LED lighting fixtures and the technology to control them via computers would provide a whole new toolkit of programmable lighting effects with which artists, architects, and lighting designers could create. Among the first to recognize these non-obvious implications of solid-state lighting were George Mueller and Ihor Lys. Over the next decade Color Kinetics, the company these two twenty-somethings founded in 1997 to pursue their vision, would blaze a trail for the revolution in semiconductor illumination. Initially this would be colored lighting, for decorative purposes. White would come later.
As you might expect with a disruptive technology, Mueller and Lys did not come from a lighting industry background. In fact, their previous experience was in the robotics laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, where both had been graduate students in electrical engineering. There, they had been involved in the development of autonomous robotic vehicles, driverless Humvees that, at certain times of year, would careen off into the Nevada desert vying with their robotic rivals for a $2 million prize from the Pentagon. Riding shotgun in one of these autonomous vehicles could be terrifying, as Lys vividly recalled. “Computers do not have a fear term that gets put into their speed calculation,” he said. “If the computer knows that it's right, it's going to floor the accelerator and go as fast as it wants. And it knows that the vehicle won't tip over, so it knows exactly how far it can turn the wheel.”
In this work, LEDs were one of those technologies that just kept popping up, in the form of optical components that were useful for various things, like sensing and thermal scanning. Lys could no longer remember exactly what the initial attraction had been. “But we started playing with them, and we did many of the things that people aren't supposed to do with LEDs—we ran them really hard, we pulsed them at crazy frequencies, and tried to get them to do all sorts of strange things.”
It was a classic case of the playful, poke-it-and-see-what-happens mentality of the computer hacker, a category into which Lys clearly fitted. At one point during what his CV drolly described as his “seventeen years” as a PhD student at CMU, Lys had built a system with seventeen disk drives hooked up to his computer, the sort of goofy thing he would do just to see if it could be done. Lys's other great love was designing circuits. But by the early 1990s, the impetus to play was no longer as attractive as it had been in the early days. If you needed more computing power, CMU had a network of five thousand computers. If you designed a nifty little circuit, you didn't actually have to build a chip; you gave it to the computer-aided-design vultures and it would disappear into their automated circuit generation libraries, never to be seen again.
So seeking further amusement, Lys and his friend Mueller began working with LEDs, making lightbar displays. These relied on a phenomenon known as “persistence of vision.” You scrolled information across a display that was four feet high but just a few columns of LEDs wide. The eye would retain enough of the information to form an image of the entire picture. Mueller decided that lightbar displays had commercial potential for advertising purposes. The pair formed a company, Stone Age Technologies (“Because there weren't supposed to be any technologies in the Stone Age, right?”), to market them. The displays used thousands of LEDs, red and “that awful gallium phosphide green.” But lightbar displays were not a commercial success. “We sold a few of them, but there were always two issues that came up,” Lys recalled. “The first was, Can you make the image sit there and hang? And of course that's fundamentally impossible with this kind of thing. The other question was, Why does it cost so much? And the answer is, Because the product you really want has already been invented, and it's called the television. It took us several years to realize that you just couldn't convince people that they wanted this thing.” By 1996 their first attempt at a company was moribund.
But at least the lightbar display served to gain Lys and Mueller entry to the lighting industry and to give them an awareness of the unexpected opportunities there. Checking out an entertainment industry trade show, the pair noticed what seemed to them a giant hole in the market. Namely, that while the high-end, super-bright segment of professional lighting seemed well supplied with product, at the low end, below 200 watts, there was almost nothing except garden-variety halogen light sources. If you needed different colors, you bought a couple of these lights, stuck filters in front, and hooked them up to your dimmer rack. “We knew that there was something to be had there. Of course it didn't take us very long to trip over LEDs as being the right way to do that, because we had piles of them sitting around doing nothing. And that's really how the idea got started.”
Right around this time, Lys got his hands on some of Nichia's first bright blue LEDs. “They were six dollars apiece, but they were cool. . . . The other thing that Nichia's salespeople were pushing was pure green. Originally, I was like, They're six dollars apiece, there's no way, I'll just have to use the other greens. The sales guy was like, I'm going to send you some of the pure greens, you have to play with those. And they were fairly impressive. . . . One of the initial thoughts George and I had was that this was one of these things that would probably be aided by the network effect. That is, whereas one unit probably wouldn't be very impressive; but a hundred of them, now that might be really cool. And I don't mean a hundred LEDs, I mean a hundred clusters of LEDs.
“The interesting thing was that, at that point, there weren't too many other people in that space. I mean, nobody was working on LEDs. It was kind of like this forgotten technology that you used for indicators, they were seven cents apiece, and that was that. So we had piles of LEDs from robotics, and George would say, Drive them harder, try this, try that, try something else, y'know, just keep working on it. He was very much the sort of person who would say, Oh no—you can do better than that, I know you can do better.” Mueller would keep challenging Lys, betting him five beers that he couldn't make a microprocessor-controlled light fixture based on LEDs, or find a way to address the individual lights using Ethernet protocols. Time after time, Lys would rise to the challenge.
I meet this odd couple, Lys and Mueller, in Color Kinetics’ headquarters. These are unexpectedly located, not out in some anonymous high-tech business park, but smack in the middle of historic downtown Boston, directly across from Ben Franklin's birthplace, just behind the Old South Meeting House where the uprising that led to Boston Tea Party began. An appropriate setting, perhaps, for a company whose goal is to revolutionize the lighting industry.
Lys the technological wizard is relatively compact in build with a chubby, square-shaped face. A deceptively sleepy look conceals a sharp intellect and a dry wit. The child of Ukrainian immigrant parents—Ihor is the Ukrainian version of Igor (“The Russians don't have the h sound so they have to use a g”)—he was born in 1969 just outside Washington, DC, where his father was a hydrological engineer on the Potomac River.
Mueller is tall, slim, and handsome, with curly longish light brown hair and a winning smile. A self-confessed lover of excitement, he evinces an infectious, almost puppy-dog-like enthusiasm. Born in 1970, he grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. This is an affluent suburb of Detroit, but growing up in a divorced family taught him self-reliance. As a kid he did all sorts of things around the house, from sewing on buttons to fixing lawnmowers. In essence, Mueller is about as close as it gets to your archetypal, all-American entrepreneur. He revels in the sheer joy of creating something new. Stone Age Technologies was his first company, started while he was still at business school, doing a degree course he never finished, as a way of putting what he was learning into practice. “Business school doesn't teach business,” he grins. “You've just got to roll up your sleeves and do it.” Lys adds that, “George is a big proponent of, when you've got something—try and sell it.”
But it was on his second start-up, Internet Securities, that Mueller really cut his teeth. This is an online service that provides news and data about the world's emerging markets. Mueller formed the firm in 1994 with his brother Gary, who credits him with having had the foresight to realize the significance of the Internet as a medium for information delivery. Mueller flew to nineteen emerging markets in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia. With him he carried crammed into four suitcases—the maximum allowed—enough equipment to set up an entire office. In each location, he built a remote Internet site based on the best available technologies of the time, like Cisco routers. He signed up information suppliers, then found customers willing to pay for the data. The company survived the collapse of the dot-com bubble and continues to flourish to this day. In 1999 the brothers sold 80 percent of the company for $43 million.
Long before income from Internet Securities began to flow, however, the thrill of creating something from nothing had gone. By 1996 Mueller was ready to move on to his next new thing. He started Color Kinetics based on his savings of sixteen thousand dollars, plus forty-four thousand dollars’ worth of credit card debt. (These days, when Mueller delivers lectures in business schools, he tells students that number one on his list of things that people who want to start their own businesses should know is the maxim: “Credit card companies do not read business plans.”) In addition, Color Kinetics raised an initial round of financing from angel investors, “what a lot of people call family, friends, and fools.”
Having had the original insight that computer-controlled solid-state lighting systems were viable, Mueller and Lys began building prototypes in the latter's two-bedroom apartment in Baltimore. Color Kinetics’ first big break came at the Lighting Dimensions International show in September 1997. Rounding up four interns from MIT's Sloan School of Management to assist them, Mueller and Lys stuffed their prototypes into backpacks and flew to Las Vegas. There, they bought some carpet remnants, a card table, and a laser printer—“You want a brochure? We'll print one out for you!”—and pitched their tent amid all the high-tech booths at the show. The makeshift nature of their materials did not seem to matter. Lighting designers took an immediate shine to Color Kinetics’ novel marriage of LED lighting fixtures and computer smarts. They began ordering product on the spot, before the young entrepreneurs even had time to determine pricing. “It was almost as if they wanted to hug us,” Mueller recalled. The pair walked away with a full order book and an award for architectural lighting product of the year.
To understand the attraction, it helps to know something about the conventional technologies that then held sway in the professional lighting market. Most derived from theater lighting. Your basic theatrical light is an unglamorous object known as a PAR can,2 a simple metal case housing an incandescent bulb. The only control you have over such lights is the ability to dim them. Look above any stage and you will see PAR cans dangling from racks. Color is produced by gels, sheets of translucent material placed in front of the fixture in the path of the beam. These gels have a limited life, especially in saturated (i.e., pure) colors. The color fades or the sheet melts, then it has to be replaced.
PAR cans are static and cheap. There are also moving lights, sometimes also known as intelligent fixtures. These are more expensive. They use a built-in stepper motor to manipulate the light in some way. For example, they can change the color of the beam using a glass dichroic filter, or the shape of the beam using a gobo—wonderful name—a circular stainless steel plate with holes cut in it. The motors are remotely controlled by signals from a lighting console. With these lamps, there has to be a physical component that moves around, for example, glass filters moving back and forth or a color wheel. But every time you have a part that moves, you have a part that fails. (Especially when your motor-driven light fixtures happen to be located halfway up the exterior wall of a luxury hotel on the edge of a desert, say, subject to sandstorms and constant 40-plus-degree Celsius temperatures.)
Red-green-blue LEDs give control over all aspects of light. That is, the ability to change hue (color), saturation (how much white is present), and brightness (amount of light). These aspects can be electronically modulated with such speed and precision that the changes take place too fast for the eye to comprehend. Color-shifting means you can achieve very subtle changes of hue and millions of different shades. The tiny devices could also be packaged in modules that were much smaller than conventional lights and had no moving parts. Each individual device could be addressed, like computers and printers in a network, making it easy to control enormous numbers of LEDs.
Color Kinetics took the set-in-its-ways professional lighting industry completely by surprise. “No one in this market seemed to understand cutting-edge technology,” Mueller said with relish. “You could just come in with current-generation microcontrollers and Ethernet protocols and kick the crap out of these companies at their own game. It was a threefold attack: try and bring significant high-tech brainpower into a low-tech industry that's kind of old hat. Along with that, bring in this brand-new disruptive technology and use that as a source for attacking the market. And the third part is, bring in the aggressive high-tech style. I mean, we're not a staid lighting company, we don't grow at 4 percent a year. We're not happy with that, we want to grow at a blistering pace, we want to get out there and sell. And we want people who are from the tech mindset: if you don't run, you're going to fall behind, or you're going to get eaten by a bigger player.”
In 1998, following the success at Lighting Dimensions International show, the company began hiring staff. Their first recruits were not, as at so many tech-heavy engineering school spin-offs, fellow geeks. David Johnson, Color Kinetics’ first employee, was a finance guy. “Initially my wife was a little skeptical when I told her I was going to work for a company with no revenues that made flashing lights, strobes, and color washes,” Johnson told Metropolis magazine. “She asked me if I was betting that disco was coming back.”
Another early hire was Kathy Pattison, who headed up marketing at the fledgling firm. The seven-year Apple veteran was immediately struck by Mueller. “He had a ponytail, and he oozed enthusiasm, panache, and charisma. The day I met George I thought, Oh my God, this is going to happen—it was a clean slate, a new company, technology, category, concept.” At Apple, Pattison had seen the personal computer completely change the basis on which things were done. The historical analogy with the PC was not lost on Mueller himself, who is not by nature a modest man. “We are at the exact same point in time as the early computer industry,” he told a group of MIT students in 2003. “To me, looking at where we are, it's like looking at Jobs or Gates.”
Early on, Color Kinetics was advised on business strategy by one of its individual investors, Noubar Afeyan, a biotech entrepreneur who had founded several successful start-ups. “He looked at our product and said, Make sure your intellectual property is solid,” Mueller recalled. “We started looking at the intellectual property in this space, and lo and behold—there wasn't any! I mean, it was a greenfield opportunity.” To be sure, there were a lot of LED patents, there were some display patents, but there were almost no solid-state lighting systems patents. “We were amazed, I mean, absolutely floored. So we engaged multiple patent counsel to help us out and just prosecuted like crazy—invented, invented, invented on everywhere we thought this technology would go, and everywhere we could bring it.”
Color Kinetics filed its first patent, “Multicolored LED lighting method and apparatus,” in August 1997. By mid-2005, an accommodating US Patent Office had granted the company 38 patents, with more than 130 applications pending. This audacious intellectual-property grab would subsequently cause enormous ructions within the nascent solid-state lighting industry, especially since some of Color Kinetics’ patents were extremely broad in nature, while others—such as one describing a color-changing underwater light—seemed to many to be obvious and lacking an inventive step. Color Kinetics was prepared to license its technology, but also to sue the pants off anyone it suspected of infringing. In 2002 a legal battle began between the company and a group of its rivals. At the time of writing, it had yet to be resolved.
Getting funding would prove more difficult for Color Kinetics than staking out intellectual property. In 1999, to assemble a further round of financing, Mueller attempted to shop the company to venture capitalists. But the moneymen did not want to know. Back then, the madness of the dot-com bubble was raging: cashed-up venture capitalists were throwing money around like drunken sailors. “We would continually hear, Are you guys a dot-com company? Are you a B2C company? How about a B2B?” Mueller scoffed. “It's incredible how unimaginative most VCs are. Once someone does a pet-food-on-the-Internet business, they all want to do pet-food-on-the-Internet, they're like sheep—or lemmings. And we were like, Enough! We're not Internet, or telecom, or healthcare. We're not any of those. We're a solid-state lighting company and we've got this great patent portfolio.”
Mueller and company found that it was more difficult to try to educate venture capitalists on their model and its value than it was to get private equity, either from angel investors or from strategic investors like LED chipmaker Cree, which came on board in 2001. Only just before Color Kinetics went public in April 2002 would venture capitalists wake up to the realization that here was a real company, with real customers, real revenues, and real profits.
Back in 1997, winning the award at the Lighting Dimensions International show was confirmation that Color Kinetics was onto something. Initially, however, they didn't quite know what. Mueller's original idea was to target the theatrical market, which obviously used colored light, the strong suit of LEDs. Perversely, however, the reaction from that market was negative: You're far too expensive and not nearly bright enough.
Over succeeding years, brightness and price would become less of a problem. In the same way as the microchip industry follows Moore's law, so the solid-state industry conforms to Haitz's law. First formulated in 1999 by Roland Haitz, a former research director at Hewlett-Packard (later Agilent), this law states that every decade in the forty-plus years since their invention, LEDs have increased twenty-fold in terms of their light output. During the same period, the cost of the devices has fallen to one-tenth.
HAITZ'S LAW
The first major applications of Color Kinetics’ revolutionary technology would come outside theaters, not in them. For example, the Loews movie chain wanted a new marquee sign for its flagship theater on New York's 42nd Street at Times Square. The sign, a blade that would stand six stories tall by eight feet wide, was due to make its debut on New Year's Eve 1999, when hundreds of thousands of people would crowd into the square for the famous countdown to the ball drop. Brett Anderson, the lighting designer in charge of the project, heard about Color Kinetics in early 1998, by chance, when a colleague in Edinburgh faxed him for information about the fledgling firm, which at the time had all of four employees. Anderson contacted Mueller, who sent him some sample modules. The designer was looking for something that would yield the maximum number of effects. He thought that, at best, LEDs would enable him to change color en bloc as well as dimming and brightening. What he got was the ability to control each of the quarter-million-odd lighting elements individually, so that the whole sign could be sequenced, inch by inch. It could be programmed to shimmer with waves of intense color that seamlessly morphed from one hue to another. These color sweeps could be seen from six blocks away. And, unlike with traditional fixtures, there was no jerkiness as the sign stepped from one color to the next.
Within a few years, theaters, buildings, bridges, and monuments all over the world would be similarly iridescing like squid, cycling through the colors of the rainbow, flashing and dancing with dazzling light. Color-shifting the LED way had come to stay.
To get a better handle on what was happening, I was keen to meet a specialist in lighting design, a profession I had not previously encountered. I asked Fred Oberkircher, who has been teaching lighting courses at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth for twenty-five years. He recommended Jonathan Spiers, Europe's top lighting designer, whom he described as having “the most exquisite color sense I have ever seen.” As it happened, Spiers was the person who had contacted Brett Anderson asking for information about Color Kinetics. I traveled to Edinburgh to visit him at his studio in the Dean Village.
The Dean Village is a little community on the Water of Leith, the river that runs through Edinburgh. It is separated from the rest of Scotland's capital by virtue of being located at the bottom of a ravine. Having been to school in Edinburgh and having had a friend who lived in the Dean Village, I thought I knew this area quite well. But I was not prepared for Well Court Hall, Spiers's studio, which has to be the most extraordinary set of working premises I have ever come across. The hall is located in a mini clock tower, up several flights of stone-flagged stairs. Featuring wooden hammer beams, stained glass windows, an enormous fireplace, and a minstrel gallery, it was built in 1884 by a philanthropist as a communal gathering place where local working men could meet and talk, without the influence of either religion or alcohol.
Jonathan Spiers has been lighting the insides and outsides of buildings for more than twenty years. He is an affable, quiet-spoken man with a slightly bemused air and a self-deprecatory sense of humor. I begin by asking him to explain, what exactly is a lighting designer? “We're a bunch of misfits,” he replies. “If you lined up all the lighting designers along a wall, you'd think, Who the hell are these weirdoes?” Though a professionally trained architect with a long line of letters after his name to prove it, Spiers counts himself fortunate to have discovered school theater when he was twelve years old. He became hooked on lighting. Other lighting designers, like Spiers's friend and colleague Paul Gregory, the founder of New York–based Focus Lighting (the company for which Brett Anderson works), come to architecture from a theatrical background. Spiers and Gregory often collaborate, teaching classes that climax with “guerilla lighting.” That is, “attacking” buildings with light, unbeknownst to their owners, to show students how lighting can be deployed to maximum aesthetic effect.
You might think that architects would plan for the nocturnal appearance of their buildings—it is, after all, dark half the time—but typically they do not. “Architects gave away the lighting design of their buildings years ago, to the electrical engineers,” Spiers says. “There should not be a profession called lighting designers. When the issue of how does it look in the nighttime arises, architects say, Oh, the engineer does that. But that's bullshit!” It seems education is to blame. “Lighting design at architectural colleges has tended to be a matter of formulas: calculate the number of amount of fluorescent tubes needed to illuminate a space x meters by y. It's the wrong way to inspire people about what amazing stuff light is.”
This unwillingness of architects to take lighting seriously is an old problem. In the early twentieth century, with the coming of modernism, there was considerable enthusiasm, especially in the United States, for the use of electric light as a new building material to create what Dietrich Neumann, in his magisterial Architecture of the Night, describes as “a future luminous architecture.” In American cities during the 1920s and 1930s, thousands of buildings were lit up. Skyscrapers were ideal subjects. Neumann quotes a 1925 article from the New York Times that describes the Manhattan skyline as “a fairyland of night…a huge city of illuminated castles in the air.”
Unfortunately, however, much of the impetus for picking out the outlines of buildings with strings of incandescent bulbs and, subsequently, for lighting up entire sections of buildings with white or colored floodlights, came from companies that sold electric power. They saw large-scale illumination as a good way of generating revenue, especially during the 1930s, to make up for industrial customers lost during the Depression. This made architects leery, their suspicions being compounded by the fact that most lighting designers came from a theatrical background and were thus ipso facto infra dig. Architectural journals hardly deigned to notice the subject of lighting design. Architects exhibited what the trade magazine Light called “a peculiar reluctance to be educated.” For most, it was all a little too much like Las Vegas.
The ephemeral art of architectural illumination has also suffered from external factors, followed by collective amnesia—lighting plans were seldom written down—necessitating its subsequent reinvention. The blackouts of World War II put a stop to most outdoor illumination. It was not until 1964 that floodlighting of the top thirty stories of the Empire State Building began. The oil crises of the 1970s caused a second hiatus. Floodlighting of public monuments did not resume until the 1980s. The coming of computers enabled a move from static displays to programmable lighting sequences. But until the advent of LEDs, maintenance issues often proved crippling for designers trying to use light in innovative ways.
It has thus taken lighting designers a long time to achieve legitimacy, to belatedly respond to the earlier utopian visions of a new luminous architecture. Their involvement in architectural design continues to be the exception rather than the rule. The conflict continues: lighting designers like to do exotic things; architects are forever complaining that such schemes do not reflect their design goals. The lighting of buildings is often still merely an afterthought rather than something integral to the structure.
Neumann points out that “light frescoes” had been predicted in the 1920s. But it was not until the coming of large-scale LED displays like the NASDAQ screen in Times Square that such visions could be realized. Even then, the challenge remains of how to integrate the screens with the architecture upon which they are hung. Recently, however, lighting designers have begun taking advantage of the unprecedented controllability of LEDs. Here are some contemporary examples, the first one by Jonathan Spiers.
“We proposed this idea for a big financial center project in Dubai. It was the gateway to an entire site of about fifty buildings, a nine-story building, with two office blocks on the sides and a three-story slab over the top, and you walked in underneath. Dubai started life as a trading nation, buying and selling pearls and spices, then they found all this black stuff [i.e., oil] under the ground and made a lot of money from it. But a financial center is all about buying and selling, doing a deal, a transaction, which involves interaction and communication. So I asked myself, What would make people want to walk underneath this gateway?
“I had this idea that we'd have a grid of LEDs embedded in the ground, RGB, Color Kinetics or whatever, and nine stories up, a TV camera. This is not cutting-edge stuff, it's using existing video processing technology, with a little bit of a twist. Basically, you'd walk onto the floor from one end, the camera would pick you up, and you'd get an aura from the LED units around you changing color. So from a background color of blue, it might go to cyan. Someone else walking from another direction would have the same color, and as you meet, maybe it goes to pink, or a more saturated color. If three people get together, it goes to red, and if six people, to yellow. And this would all be happening live, in real time. One person splits off because he's got to go to a meeting, he takes his aura with him, he's back to his cyan color, and the collective aura of the group diminishes, because there's more power in collective debate and discussion. Imagine it, it'd be great—there'd be little kids rushing around going, Look, I've changed color! You couldn't do that with any other source than an LED in terms of that fast response, low power consumption and all that.”
Unfortunately, at the last minute, much to his chagrin, the client backed out of implementing this design, but Spiers is determined to use it on another project. Other designers have been more fortunate. For example, James Carpenter, who designed interactive walls for the south and the north facades of the new 7 World Trade Center building in New York. The function of the facades is to conceal an electricity substation that occupies the building's first six stories. At dusk, 220,000 blue and white LEDs illuminate the walls from within. Motion-sensing cameras mounted high on building corners track pedestrian movement. As people pass on the sidewalk below, a multistory strip of vertical cobalt-blue light gracefully follows them, making the wall a kind of light show for each passerby. When many pedestrians walk by simultaneously, they create complex patterns of moving columns of light. “It's not Times Square,” Carpenter told Business Week. “We wanted to be very subtle and not too bright, so it illuminates quietly and uniformly.”
Responsiveness to passing traffic is also a feature of an LED installation near where I live in Melbourne. It is a three-hundred-meter-long wall located just before the junction of a bypass and a ring road. Functionally, this wall is an acoustic barrier. Aesthetically, it serves an entirely different purpose. Embedded in the transparent screen-printed acrylic panels that make up the wall are 935 custom-made weatherproof light fittings called luminaires. Stacked in columns of five, one meter apart, each luminaire contains a cluster of nine LEDs. The LEDs can be individually programmed to produce any color. The display is triggered by transducers in the road and controlled by computer. As you drive past, the patterns change constantly, streams of light rippling across the wall. They vary depending on traffic density: the more vehicles on the road, the slower the rate of change (so as not to distract drivers).
The original idea, according to Robert Owen, the artist who designed the wall, was to suggest the flickering television sets that can be seen through the lace curtains of the houses that belong to the mostly Italian migrants who live nearby. But the LED matrix can also function as giant low-resolution video screen, a blank canvas that may be offered to other artists at festival times, or as a bulletin board that can send text messages. (“Are we there yet?” was one that waggish designers ran during tests before the bypass opened.)
Few people have spent more time thinking about the implications of LEDs than Sheila Kennedy, a Boston-based architect who teaches at Harvard. She sees the new solid-state lighting as very different than previous forms of lighting such as candles and incandescent bulbs. “The first point to make is that LED illumination is cool light in terms of device temperature. The efficacy of the semiconductor is so great that a vast percentage of the energy is transmitted into light with very little loss in heat.” In fact, Kennedy sees the way LEDs generate light as being more like the bioluminescence produced by living creatures such as fireflies, bacteria, and fish. “From cool light and the idea of nature, suddenly you can imagine that there's a new level of integration that's possible, and that changes everything. Light can be introduced and blended into a variety of different hosts, materials that have properties that are entirely different from the way our culture thinks about light, which is as a kind of object fixture.”
At Harvard's new school of film and digital video, Kennedy has integrated LEDs into a curtain wall made of fabric that automatically brightens and dims in a series of behaviors that mimic cinematic light. She has also been working with textile manufacturers to produce fabrics with LEDs embedded within them that can be used in a variety of innovative ways. For example, a blanket that would generate enough light to read by. “What we're beginning to understand culturally is that light is a material, an emissive material. . . . I think you'll see the next generation of architects and artists become more comfortable with these materials and try to understand their properties.”
One such artist is James Clar, twenty-six, who has designed an “energy mesh” that will wrap around the Habitat Hotel, to be built in Barcelona in 2008. This takes advantage of the affinity between solar cells and LEDs, the former generating electricity in the form of direct current, on which the latter runs. The mesh incorporates five hundred RGB LED nodes. During the day, the nodes will collect energy from sunlight. At night, the mesh will be programmed to glow in specific color schemes whose brightness is determined by embedded photosensors. Thus the glow that envelops the building will change dynamically, depending on the weather and the season.
Artists have always been fascinated by light. Think of Caravaggio, who used chiaroscuro (Italian for “light-dark”) to transfix his subjects in dramatic shafts of light against somber backgrounds. Or the Impressionists, for whom light was the central concern, as with Monet, and his light-drenched haystacks, or Degas, and his lime-lit dancers. Then, in 1963, a Brooklyn-born artist named Dan Flavin created a new medium out of light itself. He hung an industrial-grade yellow fluorescent tube on the wall of his studio at an angle of forty-five degrees, cheekily titling his priapic work The Diagonal of Personal Ecstasy. From there, Flavin went on to produce a whole series of light installations, each one made up of fluorescent tubes in basic colors arranged in rectangles, parallelograms, and other simple geometrical shapes. In so doing, according to New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman, Flavin “consciously blurred the distinction between art and architecture, seizing architecture as part of art's sculptural vocabulary, incorporating corners, walls, doorways, and windows.”
There were of course limits to what could be done with linear fluorescent tubes. Other artists have sought to push further what can be achieved through the use of light. Towering above them is James Turrell, who has spent his forty-year career learning how to shape light, exploiting its physicality, what Turrell calls its “thing-ness.” He has created light installations that appear so substantial that, believing them to be solid, viewers have been known to lean on them, fall over, break their wrists, and—this being America—sue the artist for damages.
Turrell is best known for Roden Crater, an extinct volcano located near Flagstaff, Arizona. There, for many years, he has been boring into the rock to create observation portals through which the sky and other celestial phenomena may be viewed. To fund this magnum opus, Turrell undertakes commissions, including lighting design for buildings. During the course of this work, he was introduced to LEDs. Turrell has said recently that he wishes LEDs, and the precise control over light they offer, had been available to him decades ago when he began working with light. “I thought [the technology] would come a lot earlier; but here it is, so I'm not going to complain.”
Turrell has used Color Kinetics LED fixtures in several recent installations. One such is glowing blue light chambers for the lobby and the library at Greenwich Academy, a private girls school in Connecticut. Another is a black granite swimming pool, in the basement of a barn, also in Connecticut, owned by property developer Richard Baker. The pool is surrounded by thin ribbons of light that morph from flaming reds and pinks to cool shades of blue and purple. Turrell's largest LED project thus far is the Takarazuka School of Art in Osaka, a glass-fronted tower block designed by Tadao Ando, Japan's leading architect. Throughout the night, the facade of the building changes color. It begins with one hue, which very gradually changes to another.
In many ways light artists like Turrell and lighting designers like Spiers have only just begun to investigate what the new technology has to offer. “One thing that's going to happen,” Spiers predicts, “is that people will start to play. I've got little color-changing LED things that I gave my kids. And they sit there in the dark playing with these things. The guys on my team are all basically as mad as I am, they're interested in the medium, and we're always trying to push our clients into doing something interesting.” Much of what is currently being done is not so interesting, color-shifting simply for the sake of it. Gaudy me-too buildings are popping up everywhere, nowhere more noticeably than in mainland China, on the illuminated new skylines of Beijing, Shanghai, and a host of other Chinese megacities.
Despite all their advantages for the lighting designer, LEDs also have at least one big disadvantage, one that paradoxically derives from the rate at which the technology is improving. “Let's say a client wants something really zizzy [sic],” Spiers explains. “You specify five hundred of these LED fixtures to wrap around the facades of a shopping mall, and you program up something really cool, so there's these subtle color shifts and all the rest of it. The issue is, after three or four years, there's a fault in five of the fixtures, for whatever the reason might be—maybe water gets in, maybe they blow up, maybe vandals come along and trash them. So you need to go and buy another five. You call Color Kinetics and ask them to send five of those Color Blast fixtures that you bought four years ago. They say, Oh, we don't make those anymore. You ask, Why not? They tell you, Because the LEDs we've got now are far better than the ones we had four years ago: better colors, more purity, and they last much longer. And you say, No, no, no—I've got 495 other ones, I want replacements that are exactly the same! In that sort of situation, it's not good to be an early adopter.” As another designer points out acidly, “We call them light fixtures for a reason.”
The blistering rate of change in the solid-state lighting industry contrasts markedly with the sedate pace of the construction industry. “The lighting business is a lot slower than we thought,” Ihor Lys complains. “Part of that is what we call the ‘spec cycle.’ For there to be a demand for lights, buildings have to get built, and that's a multi-year process. We had assumed that they do just-in-time engineering on a lot of this stuff, and to some extent they do. The difficulty is that schedules slip, so all sorts of things happen, where the lighting plan for a building has been designed and fixed and waiting for the building to be built for five years. That happens quite regularly, actually. But for someone trying to start a company, that's a terrible set of conditions. You have to try and convince people to change plans, or you have to submit your stuff, they take a look at it, then they tell you that you don't have enough installations for them to trust what you're telling them. Or, that they can't put you on such-and-such a project because the bids have already gone in, but they have another project that's going to be built four years from now, and would you like a piece of that?”
Despite such frustrations, by 2005 Color Kinetics was doing “very nicely, thank you.” In just its eighth year in business, the company had racked up $53 million in annual sales, of which $4.3 million was profit. Color Kinetics lighting modules were now being used in some very large-scale projects, like the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. “These are LEDs lighting up an eleven-story building,” George Mueller bragged. “Who on earth would think that these little indicators which used to be in clock radios or power-on buttons would be lighting up a whole building that's like a couple of football fields in area? Ten years ago, you couldn't imagine that LEDs would be lighting something as big as this, doing a great job, beating out the traditional technology and saving a significant amount of operational cost. I mean, this hotel is saving approximately $40,000 a year on power and maintenance costs; they went from 44 kilowatts to 4 kilowatts. It's just a phenomenal story.”
In 2004 Color Kinetics announced that it was moving on from color with a series of white light products targeted at the professional lighting designer. At the time of this writing, these products were already in their third generation. The efficiency of their light sources was 40 lumens per watt and rising. “Within the next few years we're going to be shipping product in the 70 to 100 lumens per watt range,” Mueller predicts. “As soon as we hit 70 lumens [the point at which LEDs become competitive in light output with compact fluorescent lamps], it starts to get very exciting; we get to a 100 [competitive with linear fluorescent tubes], and it's dancing-in-the-streets-naked kind of exciting. So it's like the rocket boosters are going.” He brings his hands together to form an inverted V and vibrates them. “Everything in the industry's rumbling, and we're just waiting for it to blast off, right?”
Thus far, we have looked at the aesthetic benefits that the unprecedented control over light sources brings. But there is also another, related set of considerations, the enormous implications of which are only beginning to be understood. “The other thing that is going to happen that we have no concept of right now,” Mueller explains, “is that we are going to start learning a lot more about human factors and human behavior under ambient lighting conditions.”
We already know that light influences all sorts of things, most notably human health. Studies of maternity wards have shown that whether the lights are left on at night has a slight influence on the growth rate of newborn babies. Lighting also plays a major part in what constitutes a healthy environment. Hospital patients lying immobilized in windowless wards are often forced to look at the ceiling and walls under the same lighting conditions for hours if not days. LED lighting systems would make it possible to change the color temperature from warm—reddish—to cool—bluish, replicating lighting conditions outside. Such systems may even be used to treat those who suffer from, for example, seasonal affective disorder (SAD), aka the winter blues. This is thought to be the result of a biochemical imbalance caused by the shortening of daylight hours and the lack of sunlight in winter.
Schools that use daylight and view-windows report dramatic increases in student performance compared to those confined to electrically lighted, enclosed classrooms. In the office, too, it is known that there is a correlation between worker happiness—and more important, from an employer's point of view, productivity—and the type of lighting under which they work. “If you give people a choice of what kind of office they want,” Mueller says, “they typically say a corner office with windows, and if they can't have that, they want daylight. I think, in twenty years from now, you might see lighting mimicking daylight outside. It might become common to use light to get your biorhythms into the cycle of the day and the season of the moment; if it's fall, it might be warmer color temperatures and a shorter daylight cycle, and so on.”
The ability to control color temperature is also of great interest to designers of next-generation airliners, who are planning to switch to LED systems en masse. Indeed, it is in the air that some of the most sophisticated applications of solid-state lighting may initially occur. The prospect of ultra-long-haul—nineteen-plus-hour—flights is forcing the airline industry to rethink the way interior space is lit. For example, in the cabin of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, due to enter service in 2008, harsh fluorescents will be replaced by an LED system that can be programmed to replicate the day-night cycle. At mealtimes, a subtle red blush will be added in an attempt to make airline food look more appetizing. After dinner, LEDs on the ceiling will twinkle like stars, mimicking the sky at night. Next morning, the cabin crew can bring up the lights gradually, to create an illusion of sunrise.
George Mueller and Ihor Lys were not the only ones to begin tapping the potential of solid-state lighting. The next chapter investigates two other, very different entrepreneurs, the companies they formed, and the uses they found for the new high-brightness LEDs.
1. In October 2005 Dialight, a leading maker of traffic signals announced that, over seven years, it had used seventeen million LEDs without a single failure in the field.
2. The initials stand for parabolic aluminized reflector.