Winner of the Los Angeles Lights the Way Competition: Superbloom

As the city reimagines itself for a more connected age, how can its lamp posts embrace their role as an ever growing platform for unrelated but increasingly essential services? How can each component be expressed so that citizens are aware of what the city monitors and what services it provides? How can such an eclectic collection of things become a singular icon of the city itself? And how, paradoxically, can an icon also disappear into the fabric of the place it inhabits?

The solution is not to force a singular lamp post to be all things at all times, but rather to reimagine it as a bundle. Each service is assigned a dedicated steel tube which generates form (a sort of inverse fluting that references a traditional post), structure, and forward-looking expandability. Though welded into a single structure, the bouquet appears held together by the metal straps already in use by BSL to affix street signs and other services.

As a system, however, rather than a singular pole, the bouquet can absorb future services as well. Extra tubes are built in to the design for future use. Additional arms can be quickly and affordably fabricated. The streetlight expresses its purposes as simply as possible and yet remains open to change and to the future. It is honest, too, in its assembly. It is a kit of familiar parts -- really just tubes and a few bolts -- so that even its flexibility is expressed. Its beauty starts with its human-scale practicality

Through its structure and form the bouquet expresses its variety of purposes even while it rationalizes their organization.


At home anywhere in the city of L.A...



The living city is embodied by a dynamic amalgamated whole. The streetlight, an L.A. character acts as a supporting actor for a city of stars.

The streetlight’s bouquet speaks to the diversity of the city of Los Angeles — a single entity made up of an ever-growing variety of cultural positions. At this moment the city has a historic opportunity to reimagine its core systems as a symbol of this diversity, rather than an expression of ordered uniformity. In this way it can become a true icon of the city of Los Angeles.


Perhaps most importantly, the bouquet imparts a certain sense of naturalness to the street light, allowing it to blend into the city, even as it illuminates and frames it.


Cultural plaque

SUPERBLOOM by Project Room from Piminski on Vimeo.

Done in collaboration with Joakim Dahlqvist, Sumit Sahdev, and Isaac Resnikoff under the collaborative platform Project Room.