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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
Believe it or not, a dazzlingly gaudy Vegas light display actually represents a major step forward in energy conservation.
Nov 5, 2004 | The gaudy allure of Las Vegas lies very much in its conspicuous consumption, its flagrant abuse of resources. Entire buildings are drenched in dazzling displays of color, like the 10-story façade of the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, striped with an array of lights capable of producing 16.7 million colors. Throughout the day and night, customized light shows advertise special events and attractions in beacons of extravagance.
But the design technology behind the Hard Rock lighting is easy not just on the eyes but also on the wallet and conscience. While the original decade-old exterior lighting system racked up maintenance costs, this new lighting system is lit with light-emitting diode technology that will save the resort $41,000 per year in operational costs; an ecologist's delight, the cost of electricity for the LED system is approximately one-eighth the cost of the older system.
For those unfamiliar with the LED, it has long been the great hope in creating a more energy-efficient light bulb, but the technology has never been manipulated to create the pure white light necessary for widespread residential use and the resultant energy savings. But the technology has made leaps forward -- and its environmental virtues exploited -- by designers who are beguiled by the easy-to-manipulate light source, and it is showing up in various high-end homes and well-funded public spaces, from Boston Symphony Hall to the Grand Ole Opry and Manhattan's massive new Time Warner building.
The LED was invented in 1962 by Nick Holonyak Jr., while he was working for General Electric. "I told Reader's Digest in the 1960s that incandescent bulbs would ultimately vanish," Holonyak says today. He's not surprised that hasn't happened yet -- " science is a slow process that takes time and effort" -- but he's dazzled by the new use for his simple semiconductor diode.
The LEDs he created were used for "indicators, numerals, letters on instruments. You know when you get on the bus, and you see those little red lights flashing? I'm the person who made those. That primitive version of mine is still being used because it's so cheap to make." Everyone, of course, probably has been woken by an alarm clock with a dim red LED display. Last spring, Holonyak was awarded the Lemelson-MIT Prize for his work with diodes. Of the new uses for LEDs, he says, "It's a magnificent thing."
A designer writing in the New York Times last month proclaimed enthusiastically that recently "LEDs became the Paris Hilton of lighting, popping up everywhere" so "that interior designers like me are racing to catch up." Diode displays, not wholly unlike multicolored Vegas casinos, are lighting up shelter-magazine dining rooms, hip Manhattan restaurants, and pulsing to the beat in the country's most exclusive clubs. The Times piece also mentions that ubiquitous trend-meister Karim Rashid "embedded L.E.D.'s in the floor of Morimoto restaurant in Philadelphia" and at the Smiramis Hotel in Athens, where he "installed L.E.D.'s in the floor outside the rooms. A guest can type a message ('do not disturb' for example) on a keyboard in the room, and it will appear outside."
