The designers James Carpenter and Davidson Norris, of New York’s Carpenter Norris Consulting, have recently installed heliostats on a residential tower in Battery Park City. The mirrors bring daylight into a portion of the new Teardrop Park, a 2-acre park designed by landscape architect Michael Van Valkenberg, that would otherwise escape the path of the sun. Eight feet in diameter, the mirrors focus light that is 90 percent of the brightness of the sun onto an elliptical footprint on the ground. Norris says glare is not an issue, as the intense light source is no different than staring at the sun—a pastime few people willingly indulge in. Norris and Carpenter have designed a more complex version of a heliostat as a perforated metal lining for the interior of the dome of New York’s new Fulton Street Transit Center. That nearly $900 million project, designed by Grimshaw Architects and scheduled for completion in summer 2009, would reflect light down to multiple levels of subway platforms and corridors.
