Celebrated visual artist and author Douglas Coupland has been chosen to create the esthetic lights display for the new Gordie Howe International Bridge between Windsor and Detroit.
The Vancouver-based artist created the Northern Lights display on Calgary’s 60-storey Telus Sky Tower, designed by Denmark’s Bjarke Ingels, which opened in 2019.
The Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority chose the artist to create both a “dynamic and static” display on 5,000 pre-installed white lights on the bridge deck and two towers for the longest cable-stayed bridge in North America, expected to open next fall.
Coupland is also the author of numerous books but is perhaps best known for his Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991).
The light concept is far from finalized — it won’t be revealed until next year — and the artist was in Ontario to meet the public and obtain suggestions on what they might like. Themes could include cross-border relations and even sports, given the bridge’s namesake.
But Coupland, in an interview with Daily Commercial News, said some of his initial ideas have to do with the current dynamism of the region that the bridge represents, including the rebirth of Detroit, the transformation of the auto industry (North America’s largest EV battery plant is being built in Windsor), and international trade as represented by the numerous freighters passing underneath the bridge.
“I get the impression this part of the world is really on the way up,” he said. “There is a reinvention, that’s the future here, which I find kind of intoxicating.’”
He said the bridge “is more than just the cherry on the cake, it’s the cake itself,” especially compared to the existing aged almost 100-year-old Ambassador Bridge. “I think it’s awfully good to have fresh new infrastructure.”
While a final lighting design hasn’t been chosen, Coupland said he does want the display to show “the bridge is alive and that makes it even more inviting somehow.”
The Calgary Telus building commission resulted in mainly yellow and green lights that “wash across the building (and) are really stunning. I would like to think I learned a lot from that project.”
While the Gordie Howe lights, pre-installed by contractor Bridging North America, will be fixed in place, Coupland’s art installation will likely not only be a static composition but “fixed sequences.” And while the lights themselves will all be all white there are many variations within that colour.
“White is actually very warm to freezing cold,” Coupland said. “They’re dimmable and they’re able to sequence those colours and individual lights in a way that they can look animated.”
The final product should be “very evocative and exciting for people to see.”
Coupland said bridges simply as structures already stand out because of their connecting status.
“They take you into another realm. They take you from one state of being into another.”
He said his installation should make the bridge inviting and signify the two countries are “open for business.”
And “anyone looking at the bridge when it’s finally complete should go like, ‘Dang, I want to drive over that thing. I want it to take me somewhere different.’”
While there will be regular sequences, adaptions can be made for special events, like a National Day of Mourning or a celebration where “you can sort of amp it up,” Coupland said. Generally, there will be different sequences over the course of the evening.
Focusing in on specific themes he said some “fundamental” concepts could be a “handshake, friendship, coming from each side, meeting in the middle.”
The esthetic lighting will be different from bridge navigational lights on the deck for vehicle, cycling and pedestrian traffic, which will also use the bridge.
Some guardrails, so to speak, will be safety — “as long as it doesn’t freak out birds or passing aircraft,” the artist said.
Challenges?
“A lot of it is mathematics and sequencing,” he said. “Very boring technical things but unless they’re all in the right order you won’t get what you need in the end.”