Hello and welcome to my new column, Patent Office. Periodically I will post possible projects, present hypotheses, and parse the impenetrable. The Patent Office will act as an outlet for incubating ideas that are not pressing enough for me to devote real, quality braintime to right now — but hopefully I’ll get around to everything, sooner or later. And everything will be a copyrighted idea, by virtue of my publishing it on the internet, the new true public record. Though I’m not sure if that’ll hold up in court.

Patent #1: City Lights (slideshow)
A slideshow lecture, wherein I propose a solution to the problem of the dark-day metropolis.

[Images of midtown New York — tight streets, tall buildings. The sky is a vivid cerulean blue, but the street lies in shadow.]

0: Tone
The tone of this needs to be half sincere and half ironic – this should be an uncomfortably elegant solution to a fundamental fact of city life. It should be both repulsive and useable.

1: Streetside
Even during the brightest day, half of Manhattan finds itself swimming in shadows — the only daylight to be found is straight up, crane-your-neck-back overhead. Yes, there’s always high noon, but what kind of a life has sunlight for half an hour a day? Not all of Manhattan. Mid-town. Wall Street. The financial districts. These men in ties, women in wool, pulling at their collars — it’s goddamn hot, here in the shade.

2: Irrigation
Brief history of irrigation. Bringing water from A to B. Allowing fertile plant-life. Irrigation of sunlight — allowing healthy mental state.

3: Implementation
Similar to roof gardens. Light irrigation would use individual buildings as conduits to channel light that passes overhead down the structure, like a rain water gutter, out to the base of the building. In this way, the base of each building will transmit the light that passes overhead at that time of the day.

4: Consequences
Utilizing sun. Sensors on tops of buildings track movement of sun, pass light down through light system, through the building and out onto the street. No need to have any adjunct power source — the coming-and-going of sunlight, due to clouds or rain, is a beautiful fact of the natural phenomenon translated to street level.

How does the sun hit the street? How to regulate how the sun encounters the street? Are light systems integrated into building facades – where there are regulations for how the light emerges from “pipes” extending out the front of the building?

Perhaps streetlights become daylights — Hijack the infastructure in place. Yes.

5: Design proposals
On the roof: Entire swaths of fiber optic fields, like the grids of a farmer’s crops. Built up one foot off the ground, letting the fibers gather in that space before being pulled together into bundles to shoot down the building’s structure.

6: On second thought
This on some level should taste of aggression. Not too polite, these light pipes. An intervention through buildings. A natural extention of using “solutions” to provide society with fundamental phenomena, the access to which should be default & a priori. An aggressive cut through building space. Foreceful.

[Again, this needs to be accompanied by a slideshow - or maybe some projection system. The imagines must absolutely positively not be read from a monitor or any other RGB system.]

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Patented! See you next time.