To experience Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night, there’s really only one place you can go: inside a gallery in New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. Starting today, you have another option. If you happen to be near Eindhoven in the Netherlands, you can walk or bike down a glowing path modeled after Van Gogh's masterpiece. The one kilometer lane is the work of Daan Roosegaarde, the same designer responsible for the glowing stretch highway we featured last week.
Like the Smart Highway, The Van Gogh-Rooosegaarde bike path (located near where Van Gogh himself lived from 1883-1885) uses a luminescent material that charges during the day and glows at night. These glowing bits look like little pebbles, but they’re actually not rocks at all. Using the smart coating material developed with Dutch infrastructure company Heijmans, Roosegaarde was able to create 50,000 fluorescent "rocks" that he then embedded into wet concrete in a swirling, pointillism pattern reminiscent of Starry Night.
The glowing spectacle has already caught the attention of countries like Japan, where Roosegaard says he has plans to model bike paths after the lines in zen gardens. He’s also working on advancing the coating technology---making it glow brighter or in different colors, which would help prevent city light pollution from washing out the lines. The big goal is to make the coating as dynamic as possible---shifting colors, markings or appearing and disappearing altogether---to account for our ever-changing urban spaces. “Let’s say on Monday you have a lane for bicycle path and then you switch it off and it’s a public space,” he muses.
Even static, the glowing lane is magical, “like biking through a fairy tale,” as Roosegaarde likes to say. But the designer suspects the path's real draw will change from person to person. "Some people will come because they’re interested in safety and energy-friendly landscapes, others will come because they want to experience art and science,” he says. “In my opinion, I think it'll be a hot spot for a first date.”
