Construction on the 40-foot-tall ‘Gateway’ structures located at the off-ramp of Highway 30 between the Interstate 35 interchange and Dayton Avenue may possibly begin in the fall and should be finished in the spring of 2012.

Planner for the City of Ames Planning and Housing Department Jeff Benson said Friday that decisions made in March by the city of Ames and Department of Transportation will lead to the bidding by the DOT, which controls the process.

A design team effort by lighting designers, landscape architects and others at RDG Planning and Design, an architectural design firm, started the project years ago and is now in the next phase of planning.

Starting out as a collaborative process with engineers at Snyder and Associates, the city of Ames DOT and the South Ames Business Neighborhood, David Dahlquist, lighting designer at RDG Dahlquist Art Studio, said the intent for the project is to visually mark the entrance to the city of Ames in a dynamic way.

“If you could see it from the interstate so that it created a gateway, so to speak, that was the idea,” said Dahlquist. “It was to heighten the awareness and a sense of a special place.”

The biggest issue for the process has been scale of the structures.

The series of 14 columns — seven flanking each side of the highway made of a combination of stainless steel, acrylic LED energy-efficient and low-voltage lighting with optional changing colors — have gone through a long process of decisions. The decisions regarded appropriate placing of the structures in conjunction with the highway and how they appear visually to drivers on the highway while not being in the right of way because of regulations that pull them back from the road.

The decision that has stayed consistent has been the concept of incorporating the idea of technology as a differentiating feature of what it means to live in Ames, said Dahlquist.

The city hoped the structures would be contemporary and would not only be timeless and last but would be low maintenance. A budget and site specifics are still being discussed as far as electrical power and where it will be located near the road.

“One of the things we looked at was the use of lighting to be symbolic of the use of technology,” Dahlquist said. “For me as an artist, I want to try to create an experience. I want there to be some kind of feeling that happens when the audience goes through this. People will go out and tell a story about what they saw.”