Until now, there has been only one place in the world where you can see Vincent van Gogh’s painting “Starry Night” – it is the gallery of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. However, starting from today, the masterpiece of the Dutch artist will also be available in the form of a glowing bicycle path that stretches for 1 kilometer, opened in the vicinity of the city of Eindhoven in the Netherlands. The author of this project is designer Daan Roosegaarde, already known for the glowing highway we wrote about last week.

Just like the “smart highway,” the Van Gogh-Roosegaarde bicycle path (located where the famous artist lived from 1883-1885) is made using a luminescent material that charges during the day and then glows at night. 50,000 glowing “stones” were embedded in the concrete surface in a spiral, pointillist style, reminiscent of “Starry Night.”

The glowing path has already attracted interest in other countries, such as Japan, where, according to Roosegaarde, he plans to create bicycle paths based on the design of Japanese garden stone paths. In addition to this, he is working on improving the characteristics of the surface, hoping to make it brighter or more colorful so that other urban light sources do not “erase” it. The ultimate goal is to make the surface as flexible as possible, easily adapting to the conditions of a dynamic urban environment, capable of changing colors, markings, appearing or disappearing completely at the right moment.

“Suppose, on Monday there is a bicycle lane in this place, but on another day you turn it off – and you just have a public space here,” Rosengard speculates.

But even in its static form, the track looks mesmerizing – as Rozegard likes to say, “it’s like riding a bicycle through a magical fairytale.” However, he believes that visitors’ interest in it will vary from person to person. “Some will come here because they are interested in modern technologies in the field of safe and energy-efficient coatings, others will come out of interest in art and science. As for me, I think this place would be perfect for a first date,” says Rozegard.