And now for something completely different…The World’s Most Unique Lighthouse!

During my layover in Sydney I managed to have a few beers with my friend Guy. Guy is one of those rare people who seem to know something about everything, not as a blow hard I might add, but in a genuinely informed and considered way.

Aside from encouraging me to explore the wisdom of the likes of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy he mentioned an unusual “lighthouse” in Iceland and suggested after I’d finished in Australia maybe I should go there… I’m not quite sure how we got from Russian existentialists to a lighthouse in Iceland but think perhaps John Lennon and a few beers may have had something to do with it.

Anyway, I’d never heard of such a thing but it encouraged me to look into it and…

The Imagine Peace Tower (Icelandic: Friðarsúlan) is a memorial to John Lennon from his widow Yoko Ono, located on Videy Island near Reykjavik in Iceland. It consists of a tower of light, projected from a white stone monument that has the words “Imagine Peace” carved into it in 24 languages. These words, and the name of the tower are a reference to Lennon’s campaign for peace, and his eternal 1971 song “Imagine”.

The Tower consists of 15 searchlights with prisms that act as mirrors, reflecting the column of light vertically into the sky from a 10m wide wishing well. It often reaches cloudbase and on a clear night it can reach an altitude of 4,000 metres. The power for the lights is provided by geothermal energy.

Buried underneath the light tower are over a million written wishes that Ono gathered over the years from another of her art installations called “Wish Trees“. She believes it is these wishes combined with the earth’s natural energy that produces the power to project pure white light into space. Iceland was selected because of its beauty, the unique electromagnetic forces that produce the Aurora Borealis and availability of perpetual of natural energy.

Two coincidences that make this extraordinary “lighthouse” feel very personal for me:

Firstly, for the Australian Bicentennial in 1988 there was a national competition to design a fitting monument to mark the moment. I suggested we construct a white laser beam light projected into space from the centre of Australia. Not surprisingly I didn’t receive any acknowledgement of my entry much less any interest. Come to think of it I can’t recall if there was ever a “winner” or if any such monument ever saw the light of day?

In hindsight, and in light (pun) of the Imagine Peace “lighthouse” it’s fitting that my suggestion went nowhere, the bicentennial of colonial settlement in Australia is hardly a statement of historic or even species significance whereas the meaning, location and universality of the Imagine Peace Tower seems to send a simple but powerful message to everyone on earth and anyone else who might be out there…

The other coincidence is that when we were visiting London in 2012 we went to the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park where Yoko was having an exhibition which included her famous “Wish Trees” on which visitors were invited to place their wishes. Our kids did this and their wishes, along with a million or so others are now entombed in the base of the Peace Tower. How cool is that!