True Blue

In Focus Lighting’s work, color plays a supporting role, enlisted in the service of a wider narrative.

- Sanam Yar

The designers at Focus Lighting will tell you they don’t think in terms of color, but a quick glance at their portfolio would seem to undercut this claim. Since its founding 32 years ago, the studio has projected color onto projects of all types and scales, from the Times Square Ball to the space shuttle Enterprise. Its most recent idea proposes bathing the Riverside Drive viaduct, a towering railroadturned-roadway in West Harlem, New York City, in a rainbow of hues.

What, then, accounts for this dissonance between word and act? “In today’s age with LED fixtures, it’s so easy just to stick a color-changing fixture on a building,” explains firm partner and principal designer Brett Andersen. “We’re hunting for inspiration, for a reason to paint a piece of architecture with color—we really don’t think about light as colored or white.”