Solar Tree to Light up Streets outside Viennese Museum

Ross Lovegrove, designer of beautiful, yet useful, things, has teamed up with Artemide and Sharp Solar to produce these solar-powered street lamps that are to light up the Ringstrasse outside Vienna’s Museum for Angewandte Kunste (that’s the Museum for Applied Arts and Contemporary Art.) They’ll be going up on a tree-line boulevard, so expect the effect to be awesome. More pics and info below. According to a statement from Lovegrove Studio, the Solar Trees “communicate more than light… they communicate the trust of placing beautifully made, complex natural forms outside for the benefit of all of society becoming a museum that if folded inside out, the museum as an incubator of change in society… and with this the promotion of environmental science and the joy of the new aesthetics made possible by the digital process.

And there’s me thinking they were just street lights. Switching on day is October 8. [Dezeen]