As city buildings get taller, architects and designers have been grappling with the problem of overshadowing and working to avoid creating sunless, gloomy spaces in the streets below.
Now one new development near Sydney’s Olympic Park has come up with a solution.
It’s called a heliostat, which means stationary sun, and it sits atop the 39-storey Rhodes Central development.
Up close, the heliostat consists of a series of large, motorised mirrors that move to track the sun.
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From the mirrors, the sunlight is bounced up to a panel of reflectors above, which can be positioned to reflect the light down into the surrounding streets.
“We all know that our cities are getting higher, these buildings reaching for the sky and as they do they leave the leftover spaces down below dark and a bit miserable,” heliostat designer, Alex Lehmann said.
“Rather than leaving these buildings’ roofs for air-conditioners and satellite dishes, why not use that light and send it to space where we can appreciate it?”
Heliostat technology has been around for some time but has mainly been used for solar power plants in remote areas.
Mr Lehmann has been designing heliostats for years. He said this was only the second time the technology had been used on top of a residential building anywhere in the world.
The first was at Sydney’s One Central Park in Chippendale, which he helped design almost a decade ago.
“These two buildings represent the first effort to properly integrate heliostats into our built environment,” he said.
“We can change the way our cities feel down at street level by sending the light that’s otherwise lost down to the people below.”
In the case of Rhodes Central, the sunlight is redirected down into the nearby Union Square, an open space next to the railway station that’s surrounded by shops and high-rise residential buildings.
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“In this case, it was actually improving an existing overshadowing issue and so that was something that we looked at very carefully,” the development manager for the builder Bilbergia, Saul Moran said.
“It’s a dense urban area and there’s a lot of people living in apartments. It’s a great lifestyle but we also need to get outdoors, we need to get out and feel the fresh air and feel the sunshine.”
Mr Lehmann said the heliostat, which was constructed over five months, was one solution to make cities more liveable.
“Sunlight is important for us,” he said.
“In some way, I hope we can help people in this community to be a bit happier by sending them the light they need.”
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