LED Handrails – Good Concept or Potential Graffiti Surface?

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I just read an article about lighting for stairwells – an interesting concept that includes illuminated railings along stairway walls:

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Zoran Sunjic‘s design for an LED-lit stairway rail is based on the idea that a stairway that has low light can be spruced up by his LED rail, or some energy-hogging fixtures can be replaced by the inventi0n.  At each end of the rail, an LED illuminator lights up the rail – which is designed like a fiber-optic structure.

What do you think?  I think this is a really interesting concept, but as soon as it gets covered with the funk of ten thousand people running their hands all over it, it’s going to look like hell unless it’s maintained and cleaned.  Also, the minute some chump sprays paint on it or carves it up, it might look like crap.  Is the design modular?  That might be pretty handy in public installation situations.

More pics:

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Thanks, TrendsNow!

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3 COMMENTS

  1. Could be used in public building for use in emergency lighting situations, to enable people to evacuate a building. Maintenance/vandalism could be an issue, it kind of depends ‘which’ type of public buildings. Nice idea.

  2. Man ive been looking for something like this for my class project Ive been working on. I had the idea and even how to make it work but seems someone has already beat me to the idea. Im wanting to put this on a bridge that people walk across at my University. We are suppose to come up with a lighting concept.

  3. This is a cool idea which resembles something I did in my old house about ten years ago with rope lights installed behind an opaque hand rail. Light splayed on the wall and illuminated the stairs below. It was a low-energy, subtle way to provide stair safety without much shadowing.
    The problem I see with this execution is that the light really needs to be illuminating where your feet are more than your hands, and the light shouldn’t be shining in your face, which makes it hard to see your feet. Simply making the top of the rail opaque would solve that problem, and might reduce the temptation for graffitists to add art to a surface which can’t be easily seen. Hand grime would still be an issue, though, and a long rail would be a big job to clean, no matter what high-tech grime-o-phobic surface treatment might be applied before installation.

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