courtesy insurance company

How many workers will it take to change the bulbs? A lot fewer. LEDs last twice as long as the current high—pressure sodium bulbs. Oh, and they burn 30 percent less energy. Plus, the fixture's modular design makes it easy to swap out chips as LED technology improves. OVI is putting the finishing touches on its prototypes, and if tests go well next year, the lamps will soon start lighting up the city that never sleeps.

For years, architects have gone to great lengths to protect their buildings from marauding skaters. But as aesthetic trends move toward folded planes that transition seamlessly from wall to ceiling and back to wall, designers have been looking to their former adversaries for a lesson in flow.

"We have this fascination with buildings becoming topography," says Alejandro Zaera-Polo, a partner at London's Foreign Office Architects, "and skateboarders have that physical experience." So for a park in Barcelona, his firm extended paving stones up the sides of small hills—to shield vegetation from salty sea breezes. At least that's what it told city officials. But skaters got the message. The resulting quarter-pipe landed on the March 2006 cover of Transworld Skateboarding.

Architect Zaha Hadid shares the love. She wanted her Phaeno Science Center in Germany to be an all-inclusive venue for pedestrians and skateboarders alike. Liability issues prevented skate-park designation—though you'd never guess it from the YouTube videos of pro skaters "visiting" the museum. "We design spaces that are flowing and continuous, and—just by coincidence—skateboarders look for that kind of continuity," Dillon Lin, an architect (and skater) at Hadid's firm, says with a wink.

And though the new Oslo Opera House (shown here) was inspired by the image of two glaciers colliding, the architects at Snøhetta didn't call on glaciologists to help fine-tune the details. They enlisted real experts in twisted planes: skateboarders. "We spoke to them about surface textures and the areas they prefer," architect Simon Ewings says. His firm followed up the conversation with a statement in stone.

Snøhetta used different finishes of marble to guide skaters looking for rideable surfaces. Acoustically sensitive parts, like above the auditorium, got rough marble that's unpleasant to wheel over. But other areas silently beckon skaters. Surfaces rise up all over the place to become ledges, curbs, and benches—like the jagged facets of a glacier (or skate park). One particu