Hasta La Ideas

Trying to find some sort of beauty in the noisy traffic of a busy city street probably isn’t your first thought as you’re walking down an overstimulating sidewalk. In fact, if you’re anything like me, you’ll do anything you can to mentally take yourself away from the bustling environment—starting with plugging in to your headphones and creating some high-decibel eardrum damage. Urban Matter, Inc. is taking a different approach that present itself as such a blow to your hearing.

You can find your own personal moment of tranquility underneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE) in the most populous borough thanks to the Brooklyn-based design studio. Like many places in New York City, the traffic noise never stops and it gets quite dark, so the team took on the challenge of turning the noise into an interactive light exhibit. Enter “Silent Lights,” a series of gates housing 1,400 LEDs located in a Brooklyn hotspot.

At the intersection of Park Avenue and Navy St., you’ll find a series of square arches that slowly transition through a rainbow of colors according to the level of traffic noise in the area. Check out this behind-the-scenes video on what it took to create the installation:

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