In NoMa, another train underpass lights up as public art

On Tuesday, a new visual experience opens in NoMa’s L Street NE underpass, one of several passageways beneath elevated rail tracks that run through the neighborhood. “Lightweave,” a responsive lighting display designed by San Francisco-based design studio Futureforms, is the NoMa Parks Foundation’s latest installation in the neighborhood and part of a $50 million grant.

The display consists of six formations of cloud-like, lattice LED tubes suspended below the ceiling of the underpass between First and Second streets NE. With three formations on either side of the underpass, the tubes react to ambient noise, such as trains passing on the tracks above or cars driving along L Street NE.

At rest, the lights have a yellowish hue. But they take on darker tints in response to noise, moving through the space in a wave-like motion. “It’s a little bit like improv,” explains Jason Kelly Johnson, co-founder and design principle at Futureforms (previously known as Future Cities Lab). “It’s not always the same, it’s dynamically changing.”

That dynamism sets Lightweave apart from some of its urban-art contemporaries. While other recent works seem primed for selfies, the NoMa installation’s subtle tones and oscillating colors are better witnessed in person than in photographs.

Such subtleties are a feature of many of Futureforms’s works, which often play off the interaction between people and technology. For example, the studio’s Murmur Wall in San Francisco reacts with light and color to “local online activity.” Lightweave, meanwhile, uses sensors to react to the sounds of NoMa.

“The use of technology ... allows [the display] to be a little bit unpredictable, a little bit like the weather—what you’d see in a city during the change of the seasons,” says Johnson.

Edward Russell

Lightweave is the second-ever lighting installation for NoMa Parks, the nonprofit public space arm of the NoMa Business Improvement District (BID). “Rain”—a collaboration of design firms Thurlow Small Architecture + NIO architecten featuring 4,000 light rods below the ceiling of the M Street NE underpass—debuted in October.

Both displays are pieces of the BID’s ongoing effort, launched in 2014, to activate the four train underpasses in the midst of the neighborhood, on K, L, and M streets NE, and Florida Avenue NE. “They create interest and excitement and something whimsical in the underpasses,” NoMa BID President Robin-Eve says of Lightweave and Rain. “This is really what these projects are all about, making something that is normally a barrier an invitation.”

The L and M street installations, which are planned to be permanent, were originally selected in 2015 following an international design competition that saw almost 250 responses. The displays are debuting several years later than the BID had expected in part due to required reviews by Amtrak. But Johnson says the delays presented a silver lining of sorts, in that he was able to tweak the designs for Lightweave in response to community input during the wait.

Plans for the K Street and Florida Avenue NE underpasses are on hold pending planned streetscape projects, on both thoroughfares, by the District Department of Transportation. Installations for neither underpass have been selected.

For years, homeless encampments have occupied the NoMa underpasses. While the District government conducts regular cleanups of these spaces, residents experiencing homelessness often return to the sites after the cleanups take place. That has included M Street NE in recent months, where the Rain installation lights up the underpass around the clock.

Edward Russell

Jasper says she hopes that some of the additional funds proposed by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser for the HomewardDC program, which aims to end long-term homelessness in the District, will help fund services for those living in the underpasses. Bowser asked for a $37 million enhancement for the program in her proposed fiscal year 2020 budget, which the D.C. Council is currently reviewing and will vote on later this spring. (Critics say the mayor’s proposal would not do enough to meet the goals of HomewardDC or replace expiring federal dollars that fund street outreach.)

In addition to shepherding public space changes in the underpasses, NoMa Parks is charged with developing greenspace in the neighborhood. The first of at least two parks, Swampoodle Park, opened in November, and work on the second, Tanner Park, is underway. It is planned to open in early 2020.