"This is a project with no client. No one asked us to do this."
James Ramsey is standing under what can only be described as "mood lighting," in a blacked-out, warehouse space landscaped with tropical greenery on the Lower East Side of New York City. A sleek banner that recently went up over the entrance says "Lowline Lab." Ramsey calls it a botanical garden.
You might call the Lowline Lab a beta-version of the Lowline, one of the most unusual architectural bids in NYC, and one of the most forward-thinking ecological projects in the country. Its aim is to use cutting-edge solar technology to suck energy out of the sky and funnel it underground in real time. Suddenly, aboveground and underground are virtually the same. And where there once was a trolley, there's soon to be a tree. The greenery surrounding Ramsey is healthy and lush.
"We've ... been able to plant something like 60 species of plants underneath this relocated sunlight and lots of it appears to really be thriving," he says. "We have these tiny pineapple and strawberries growing. We have mint and other herbs, and actually today a big patch of mushrooms is sprouting."
Plans for the Lowline are growing at a rapid pace. It's not been too difficult to get funding, with many celebrity supporters rallying behind the concept: Lena Dunham, Spike Jonze, and Laura Prepon, among others, served on the hosting committee for Lowline's "anti-gala," a gala too cool to call itself by its family name.
The proposed project takes up an entire acre of land, in a city where land (aboveground) can cost up to $90 million an acre. But the total estimated cost for the project (land, plants, solar power, and all) is between $50- and $70 million; not a small number, but on scale with other urban projects. Installing a stoplight in a major metropolitan area is about $800,000 (based on nearby New Jersey figures), so we're talking about 75 stoplights' worth of cash.
The former Williamsburg Bridge Trolley Terminal, just below Delancey Street, which is being slated to house the Lowline was built in 1908, so modifying it to accommodate the new project is no small task, but the original structure remains largely intact, giving the space a charming contrast of indoor and outdoor, new and old. Cobblestones lie beneath some of the most cutting-edge solar technology in the country.
That technology comes from the mind of Ramsey and his colleagues, Dan Barasch, Robyn Shapiro, Ed Jacobs, Kibum Park, and Sangyun Han. Ramsey himself studied European cathedral design at Yale (perhaps part of the reason this place has a bit of the feel of a temple), and then served as a satellite engineer for NASA. He was even part of the team that created the Cassini satellites, which orbit and study Saturn, sending home images and data that have been critical to our understanding of the ringed planet.
This technological prowess has proven itself already; the lab, a prototypical test area that is running trials of the technology with real plants, has been running for two weeks, and it's already providing more light than expected—and almost full-spectrum UV light, at that.
"This light is pure sunlight," he says. "We've taken out the infrared so that we don't burn anything but we've kept almost the entirety of the visible spectrum and most of the UV, so you can get a tan."
This isn't the first time someone has attempted this sort of light harnessing; Ramsey tips his hat to engineers in Japan in the 1970s, who pioneered the concept. But new technology enables the Lowline engineers and architects to perfect the technique.
To work, the "sunlight collection dish" pivots to follow the sun as it tracks through the sky, depending on the time of day and season. As sun pours in, a reflective parabola gathers the photons, which are condensed into "a tiny little bead," and sent on a maze-like course of mirrors, through a fiberoptic cable, and dumped into a dome below ground, where a lens spreads the light through the space, mimicking the light above ground.
When it's dark outside, it's dark in Lowline. When it's winter above-ground, it's winter under-ground (although protection from the elements means the plants themselves will likely fair better in Lowline than on a busy New York street). The Lowline, then, is not just a marvel of modern technology, but a challenge even to our workman's culture, where our inside life is disconnected from the reality of the outside world. Any office worker can recall the shock of working late and walking outside to realize that the world has spun without you, dumping you into the dark of night. Lowline reconnects the indoor visitor with their world.
The plants themselves are also energy purifiers, so visitors will be able to experience clean air in the least intuitive place on Earth: a trolley tunnel under the United States' densest city.
"I think the Lowline could get people—especially kids—excited about math, science, [and] technology," says Ramsey, shrouded in soft yellow light beaming down from overhead. "We'll have this really bizarre experience, the likes of which people will have never experienced before."
