Light Fight.(The Talk of the Town)(consultant Howard Brandston and the campaign against sodium lights)

The lighting designer Howard Brandston is one of the profession's leading practitioners. In his career, he estimates, he has "maybe been responsible for more sockets being installed than anyone else"; locally, his commissions include the New York State Supreme Court, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the Meadowlands, Battery Park, and Barneys' women's store. When he lit the dinosaur wing of the American Museum of Natural History, he used low lights to appeal to kids, "running through the bones like electric mice." For the Statue of Liberty, he had General Electric manufacture a special arc tube to mimic the morning sky. The other evening, Brandston led a walking tour of the midtown street lights, to protest the city's lighting policy. Dressed in a plaid coat and a trapper hat, he stood under the clock tower in Herald Square holding a small spectrometer toward a stream of light that emanated from a cobra-head lamppost. "Look through the bullet end," he said. "With this sort of metal-halide bulb, you get almost the complete spectrum. Sodium vapor is so disadvantaged it's almost hard to imagine."

Sodium-vapor--or high-pressure sodium--lighting was Brandston's bad guy, what he calls "the lamp of least choice." He and the Municipal Art Society, under whose aegis he was conducting the tour, object to the color of the light--unlike whitish metal halide, high-pressure sodium burns yellow-orange. "There is this negative subliminal response," Brandston said. "The connotation, mainly, is crime." This month, the M.A.S. launched a campaign against the sodium lights. In a press release, Vanessa Gruen, from the M.A.S., asserted, "Yellow light muddies the colors of the surrounding neighborhoods and causes trees to look brown. It makes people feel less secure, because the colors around them are not true." Asked for comment, Seth Solomonow, a Department of Transportation spokesman, said that high-pressure sodium lights are durable and cost-efficient, and have been the city's default lights for thirty years.

In Brandston's view, an overreliance on instruments, instead of instincts, mars contemporary urban lighting plans, which should be determined not by how technically bright an area is but by how well someone standing in it can actually see. "We have, over time, overlighted everything in America," he told the tour group. Cities, he said, should be ...