A gorgeous holiday display that you can touch, via NYmag
Now that Thanksgiving is over, it’s on: the pointillist arms-race to string as many lights as possible onto massive spruce trees, museums, monuments, archways, balconies, balusters and every storefront in as many public spaces across Manhattan. Lights, lights, lights are the city’s true holiday-season tradition, and they dust every corridor of our holiday journey. Luminaries, opening in the Winter Garden at Brookfield Place on December 2, is an attempt at something somewhat new.
David Rockwell — the exacting mind behind the clean lines of JFK’s Terminal Five and the anesthetized modernism of Nobu outposts across the globe — grafts onto the massive interior of Brookfield Place (the space formerly known as the World Financial Center) in the form of 650 LED-lit hanging skylights, resembling a thumb-tacked tapestry draped from the ceiling. Three “wishing stations” scattered throughout the garden’s floor plan, and connected to a central computer brain, allow for dexterous visitors to choose a color. Once their “wish” is made at the touch-sensitive stations, that color is pushed out across the hanging rows of light.
