Architecture of the night


Architecture of the night or nocturnal architecture, also referred to as illuminated architecture and, particularly in German, light architecture, is architecture designed to maximize the effect of night lighting, which may include lights from within the building, lights on the facade or outlining elements of it, illuminated advertising, and floodlighting.
With the rise of artificial lighting in the 19th and 20th centuries, architects were increasingly aware of it as an element to be integrated into design; deliberate use of it has been popular at various times, including the design of skyscrapers and other commercial buildings in the 1920s and 1930s, in the 1950s and 1960s, and in modern festive city architecture.

History

The term is attributed to Raymond Hood, writing in a special issue of the Bulletin of the General Electric Company, also titled "Architecture of the Night," in February 1930. He wrote:
he possibilities of night illumination have barely been touched.... Eventually, the night lighting of buildings is going to be studied exactly as Gordon Craig and Norman Bel Geddes have studied stage lighting. Every possible means to obtain an effect will be tried—color, varying sources and direction of light, pattern and movement.... he illumination of today is only the start of an art that may develop as our modern music developed from the simple beating of a tom-tom.
However, architects and designers had been preoccupied with the concept for some time. The German term Lichtarchitektur first appears in print in a 1927 essay by Joachim Teichmüller in Licht und Lampe, another technical electrical publication, but he had used it as a wall label at an exhibition five months before, and there was a lengthy preceding history of more or less metaphysical discussion in Germany of "crystalline" architecture, the "dissolution" of cities, and the concept of the Stadtkrone, particularly among the members of the Gläserne Kette. In his essay, Teichmüller distinguishes between lighting design and light architecture, which will only come about through integration of the lighting engineer's concerns with those of the architect so that the "space-shaping power of light" itself is realized: "his architectural light can lead to light architecture if with it, and only with it, specific architectural effects are produced, which appear and disappear simultaneously with the light." Also in 1927, Max Landsberg wrote that commercial centers now presented such different aspects by day and night that architecture of the day and of the night should be distinguished. He argued for "not only regulations, but planning and competitions" to facilitate the development of the latter and bring order to the current chaos of advertising. That same year, Hugo Häring foresaw the "nocturnal face" of architecture soon eclipsing the "diurnal face." And also that same year, Walter Behrendt devoted a section in his book Sieg des neuen Baustils to "artificial illumination as a problem of form" and defined one of the tasks of new building as being:
not only to use these new possibilities but also to design them, illumination is exploited in a functional sense, that is, it becomes an effective tool for designing the space, explaining the spatial function and movement, and accentuating and strengthening the spatial relations and tensions.
Behrendt's examples include one interior: the lighting of a staircase in Otto Bartning's Red Cross Building in Berlin by means of tubular light fixtures placed under the corners of the flights of stairs, "underscor.. the stairs' tendency toward movement."
A British endorsement of the same concept, P. Morton Shand's Modern Theatres and Cinemas, confines itself to external lighting but embraces advertising, which was to remain a point of contention:
ight architecture is something more than a transient phase or a mere stunt. It is a definite type of modern design with immense possibilities for beautifying our cities, which is opening up entirely new and untrammelled perspectives of architectural composition. Publicity lighting is becoming to architecture what captions and lay-outs are to journalism—a new and integral part of its technique, which can no longer be ignored or derided with superior academic 'art for art's sake' smiles.

From the beginning to World War II

Electrical companies promoted the integration of lighting design into architecture, beginning with the World's Fairs of the late 19th century. In the late 1920s, General Electric was exhibiting model buildings at its Nela Park research facility in Cleveland to illustrate modern electrical advertising and building illumination as well as street lighting, and General Electric and Westinghouse both built theaters in which to display streetscapes under differing lighting conditions. Floodlighting of buildings and monuments, developed and refined by lighting engineers like Luther Stieringer and Walter D'Arcy Ryan at successive fairs, was encouraged as a way to showcase a city's most prominent buildings, particularly skyscrapers: the first attempt at floodlighting the Statue of Liberty took place in 1886, the top of the Singer Building was floodlighted in 1908, the Capitol dome in Washington, D.C. during World War I. It was soon discovered that the angle and nature of the lights distorted architectural features; in the same promotional publication as Hood's essay, Harvey Wiley Corbett argued for the form of the building to take floodlighting into account from the beginning, in a continuation of changes that had already taken place, such as the elimination of the cornice. "The form of the illuminated portion should be so tied in with the rest of the building that it should appear as a jewel in a setting, forming a coherent part of the entire structure." The setback skyscraper shape was best from this point of view, and Hood argued that classical architecture should simply not be floodlighted. Floodlighting also influenced the materials of many buildings: at the 1915 Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, a rough finish was used on Ryan's advice to diffuse the light and avoid glare, and conversely the 1921 Wrigley Building in Chicago was built with a pale terra cotta facade that becomes whiter and more reflective with increasing height, to maximize the effect of floodlighting. Lighting was an important part of the competition between skyscrapers.
Hood and André Fouilhoux's 1924 black American Radiator Building in New York was used for experimentation with illumination. Hood wrote in 1930:
We tried multi-colored revolving lights and produced at one time the effect of the building's being on fire. We threw spots of light on jets of steam rising out of the smokestack. Then again, with moving lights, we had the whole top of the building waving like a tree in a strong wind. With cross-lighting... the most unusual cubistic patterns were developed.
The lighting designer, Bassett Jones, argued for a lighting scheme using rose, scarlet, and amber color screens:
My mental picture of this building at night would result from pouring over the structure a vast barrel of spectral hued incandescent material that streams down the perpendicular surfaces, cooling as it falls, and, like glowing molten lava, collects in every recess and behind every parapet.
The building was eventually illuminated in amber. Even a critic who found the building "theatrical to a degree that opens it to a charge of vulgarity" said that "at night, when... the gilded upper portion seems miraculously suspended one and two hundred feet in the air, the design has a dreamlike beauty." Georgia O'Keeffe made a famous painting of it, American Radiator—Night in which she simplified the architecture and made the lighting white, and The American Architect called the illumination "one of the sights of the city.... The vast throngs that crowd this district at night are blocking traffic".
Floodlighting was popular in American cities in the 1920s and 1930s, all the more so as electricity prices dropped by more than half. It made cities look like a "fairyland" or a "dream city"; and it edited out ugliness, such as the power station at Niagara Falls or "poor or unsightly sections" which at night became "now unimportant blanks" in a "purified world of light". In addition to the World's Fairs, light festivals were popular in Europe beginning in the second half of the 1920s, the most important being Berlin im Licht in October 1928.
, photographed in April 1939
Authorities on both sides of the Atlantic had argued against the curtailment of floodlighting and lighted advertising signs during World War I despite the need to save fuel, and upon seizing power the Nazis immediately applied floodlighting as part of their program of public buildings that culminated in Albert Speer's New Reich Chancellery of 1939, in addition to the Cathedral of light effect wherein floodlights were used to define space themselves at the Nuremberg rallies.
In Europe, lighting of public squares in major cities was more important than in America, primarily because American cities had fewer squares. Paris, in particular, reinforced its reputation as the City of Lights by illuminating the Place de l'Opéra and the Avenue de l'Opéra as early as 1878, and in 1912 Edith Wharton wrote home in distress that the city landmarks were lighted at night, "torn from their mystery by the vulgar intrusion of floodlighting." Conversely, since European cities had hardly any skyscrapers, lighting from within the building or on its facade dominated the use of light in modern architecture to an extent that it did not in America. Some buildings used glass illuminated from within; for example Franz Jourdain's 1907 extension to the Samaritaine department store in Paris, with glass domes, and Erich Mendelsohn's 1928 Petersdorff Department Store in Breslau, with ribbon windows illuminated by over-mounted neon lighting reflected out into the street by white curtains. The emphasis on bright, flat surfaces to simplify illumination helped to spread the architectural vocabulary of modernism. Architects themselves drew attention to and embraced the greater importance of lighted advertising, rather than the American approach of floodlighting a skyscraper like "a gleaming holy grail" or "the dream castle of Valhalla" and ignoring the possibilities for lettering of the "gigantic, widely visible wall areas". Häring went so far as to welcome "the destruction of architecture" by advertising:
It is a fact that commercial buildings don't have an architectural facade anymore, their skin is merely the scaffolding for advertising signs, and lettering and luminous panels. The rest are windows.
His article, like other publications of the period, contrasts day and night views of sample buildings. One of his examples was Arthur Korn's remodeled facade of the "Wachthof." A larger later example is Jan Buijs' De Volharding Building in The Hague, where the elevator shaft and stair tower are glass bricks, lighted at night, and the illuminated sign on the roof is surmounted by a lighted shaft, but in addition the spandrels between the plate glass windows are opal glass, behind which lettering advertising the advantages of the insurance cooperative was mounted to be backlighted at night. In 1932 Mildred Adams, writing in The New York Times magazine, described Berlin, which had yet to build a single skyscraper, as "the best-lighted city in Europe" because of its "display lighting glass brick and opal glass". Another difference in the application of architecture of the night in Europe resulting from the lack of skyscrapers was that movie theaters, such as Rudolf Fränkel's Lichtburg and Ernst Schöffler, Carlo Schloenbach, and Carl Jacobi's Titania Palast in Berlin, were particularly striking examples of architecture of the night, often "the most striking sights" in cities. In the case of UfA, this extended to spectacular transformations of theater facades to advertise particular movies.
A late example of European architecture of the night is Simpson's Department Store in London, co-designed by László Moholy-Nagy, who also pioneered kinetic light art; he had recently published an essay on "Light Architecture."
The first age of experimentation with architecture of the night was brought to a close by the Depression and World War II blackouts. Not until 1956 was Walter Köhler's book on the concept, Lichtarchitektur, published, edited by Wassili Luckhardt.

Postwar

There was renewed exploration of exterior lighting in architecture in the 1950s and 1960s, this time brought to a close by the Energy Crisis of the 1970s.
Immediately after the end of the war, lighting spectaculars were used to celebrate victory; for example in Los Angeles on October 27, 1945, a hundred searchlights each with a 16-foot color wheel attached created a "crown of light" above Memorial Coliseum, and the following summer, the "Victory Lighting" festival turned London into a "fairyland" with floodlighted buildings, illuminated fountains, fireworks, and colored searchlight displays over the Thames. Sound and light shows began at Chambord in May 1952, invented by Paul-Robert Houdin, who had apparently been inspired by the pre-war use of floodlighting at the 1937 Paris World's Fair and on Paris monuments. Le Corbusier and Yannis Xenakis adapted the idea at Expo '58 in Brussels. The use of nighttime lighting in German cities such as Frankfurt immediately after the war was a different kind of architectural application, indicating the intended form of as yet unreconstructed buildings, squares, and streets "in a town that, in daytime, still looks more like a shanty town or a huge bomb site", as Gerhard Rosenberg observed in 1953.
Lighting of new buildings was less of an architectural preoccupation at first than it had been before the war, since the uninterrupted facades of the International Style did not have setbacks to facilitate floodlighting. New approaches were required; buildings including Skidmore, Owings and Merrill's Manufacturers Trust bank branch building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, completed in 1954, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson, and Ely Jacques Kahn's Seagram Building, completed in 1958, used glass walls and luminous ceilings to create a "tower of light," an updating of the technique of trans-illumination, that is, illuminating the building from within, that had been developed in Europe in the 1920s. Ada Louise Huxtable wrote of the Manufacturers Hanover Building: "The whole, viewed from the outside, is no longer architectural in the traditional sense: it is a design, not of substance, but of color, light and motion." The same year, the Tishman Building by Carson & Lundin created a "tower of light" in quite a different way, updating the American tradition of exterior floodlighting: Abe Feder's lighting design used mercury vapor lamps to evenly illuminate the aluminum facade so as to recreate the building's daytime appearance, with the accent feature of the address, "666," picked out in red neon at the top. Architects and critics rediscovered the possibilities of light, apparently unaware of the pre-war discussions. For example, also in 1958 a The New York Times writer declared "lighting an art that combines function and decoration" to be "one of the big advances in recent years in architecture". Gio Ponti condemned floodlighting as "primitive and barbaric" and predicted "a new nocturnal city":
Lighting will become an essential element of spatial architecture.... By a predesigned self-illumination this architecture will present formal night effects never yet imagined—illusions of spaces, of voids, of alternations of volumes, weights, and surfaces.... We artists will create luminously corporal entities of form.
His 1960 Pirelli Tower in Milan was a prominent example of postwar European night architecture, using ceiling fluorescent lights in the three vertical sections into which the building is divided, and rooftop floodlights reflecting off the bottom of a cantilevered roof; Walter Gropius and Pietro Belluschi's Pan Am Building was influenced by its form but used floodlighting at night.
The development of sign "spectaculars" in Las Vegas also began after World War II, going beyond those in New York's Times Square into three-dimensionality so that the architecture on the Strip " symbol in space, rather than form in space". By 1964, Tom Wolfe pointed out that "signs have become the architecture of Las Vegas"; he later dubbed them "electrographic architecture." Also in 1964, lighting designer Derek Phillips criticized such nighttime architecture of signage as deceptive:
There are few disappointments as real as entering some towns after dark and experiencing the sense of scale and vitality given by the facades of neon signs, only to find the following morning one has been in a shanty town of huts at low level, above which large sign frameworks have been erected. The nighttime appearance need not be the same, but it should bear sufficient correlation with the day appearance to be appreciated as the same building.

There were some experiments with colored floodlighting in the 1960s, such as the 15-minute sequences of changing colors on the Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport, which replaced initial static illumination with amber light.

Recent night architecture

The latest revival of interest began in 1977, with a revival of floodlighting. Color has been a major preoccupation, with computerized sequences used and, increasingly, large LED screens. The upper stories of the Empire State Building were floodlighted from 1964 to 1973; on October 12, 1977, using a new lighting installation by Douglas Leigh, they were lighted in blue and white to celebrate the Yankees' World Series win, and since then the building has been lighted in different colors to celebrate a variety of holidays and other special occasions, despite the objections of Paul Goldberger that the colors "turn into a toy". I. M. Pei and Harold Fredenburgh's Bank of America Tower in Miami, completed in 1987, also changes colors on holidays. Modern computerized lighting can respond to external conditions, as in Toyo Ito's 1986 Tower of Winds in Yokohama, or execute other complex tasks, as in the installation on the facade of the Forty-Second Street Studios in New York, where the color cycling speeds up throughout the week from slow changes on Mondays to changes every few seconds on weekend nights.
Many modern instances of architecture of the night are associated with festival architecture, both in permanent environments such as Universal City Walk in Orlando, Florida, by John Johnston, or in temporary installations, for example art works by John David Mooney such as Light Space Chicago 1977, involving searchlights on the Chicago lakefront, and Lightscape '89, involving lights and colored screens in the windows of the IBM Building in Chicago. Light festivals are once more popular, and in the 1980s and 1990s, such temporary illumination was popular worldwide, sometimes in combination with music performances, as with works by Jean Michel Jarre in Houston in 1986 and in the La Défense district of Paris in 1990. Yann Kersalé has produced both temporary installations and permanent works collaborating with architects including Jean Nouvel and Helmut Jahn, for example the Sony Center in Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, where the office tower is spotlighted and the fiberglass membranes tented above the atrium are lighted in an "extension of daylight" every evening and then in a succession of sequences emulating sunset until midnight, when the lighting becomes dark blue until shortly before sunrise, when it becomes white until full daylight. There were many searchlight displays in association with the end of 1999 and the beginning of 2000, and the Tribute in Light in which the twin towers of the World Trade Center are memorialized in twin shafts of white light is a comparable application.

Notable examples

Prewar

United States
Germany
Elsewhere in Europe
United States
Europe
Since the 1980s