Golden Gate Bridge directors have decided to replicate the slender, curved Art Deco look of the span’s light poles on a new overhead toll gantry that will be built over the southbound lanes of traffic near the administration building to electronically collect tolls.

The Friday vote for the design, one of three being considered, was unanimous. The others mimicked the bridge’s main cable and the rounded shape of the landmark’s former tollbooth, which has been taken out of service.

A toll gantry, typically an industrial-looking gray steel structure, holds the technology and gadgetry used to collect tolls electronically. But Golden Gate officials didn’t want to mar or distract from the landmark span. They had architects design structures that sported the bridge’s international orange hue, were as light and unobtrusive as possible, and reflected, in some way, the bridge’s look and feel.

“The board felt this design best fit those three criteria,” Priya Clemens, a spokeswoman for the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, said after the vote.

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The gantry will house the bridge’s next generation of electronic toll-collection equipment. Currently, the cameras and associated technology are located in and above the tollbooths, as they have been since 2000.

In 2013, the Golden Gate eliminated human toll collectors and started exclusively collecting tolls with FasTrak or cameras that capture license plates. It was the first Bay Area toll bridge to go all-electronic, and its collection equipment, last upgraded in 2007, is outdated, Clemens said.

The latest electronic toll-collection systems embrace what’s known as open-road tolling, which eliminates the need for drivers to slow down.

The technology reads transponders or snaps photos of license plates as drivers pass beneath an array of electronics. In the Bay Area, only the Benicia Bridge has an open-road system, but solely on a section of its toll plaza.

With the general design of the Golden Gate Bridge’s gantry chosen, the details will need to be worked out over the next few months. Construction will take place in 2019, and the gantry will start collecting tolls in 2020, Clemens said.

More changes will be coming to the Golden Gate toll plaza, including the possible elimination of the tollbooths entirely. The bridge once had 11 operating booths. But four were removed in 2014 to make way for the bridge’s movable median barrier, and the rest may one day be deemed obsolete and removed.

Although the current booths are Art Deco in design, they were installed in the 1980s and are not considered historic. The booths and existing toll collection equipment will remain for six months to a year after the gantry starts operating as a backup.

Michael Cabanatuan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ctuan