From its beginnings until the Second World War

Electric companies promoted the integration of lighting design into architecture, beginning with the World's Fairs at the turn of the century.[15] In the late 1920s, General Electric displayed building models at its Nela Park research facility in Cleveland to illustrate modern electrical advertising and building lighting, as well as street lighting, and both General Electric and Westinghouse built theaters in which to display cityscapes under different lighting conditions. lighting.[16]​.

The lighting of buildings and monuments, developed and perfected by lighting engineers such as Luther Stieringer and Walter D'Arcy Ryan at successive fairs, was encouraged as a way to display a city's most prominent buildings, especially skyscrapers: the first attempt to illuminate the Statue of Liberty took place in 1886, the top of the Singer Building was illuminated in 1908, the Capitol dome in Washington, D.C. during the First War World.[17] It was soon discovered that the angle and nature of the lights distorted the architectural features; In the same promotional publication as Hood's essay, Harvey Wiley Corbett argued for the building's form to take lighting into account from the beginning, in a continuation of changes that had already occurred, such as the removal of the cornice. "The shape of the illuminated part must be so linked to the rest of the building that it must appear like a jewel in an environment, forming a coherent part of the entire structure." The setback skyscraper form was best from this point of view, and Hood argued that classical architecture simply should not be illuminated.[18] Flood lighting also influenced the materials of many buildings: at the 1915 San Francisco World's Fair in San Francisco, a rough finish was used on the advice of Ryan to diffuse light and prevent glare,[19] and, In contrast, the 1921 Wrigley Building in Chicago was built with a pale terra cotta façade that became whiter and more reflective with increasing height, to maximize the effect of floodlight illumination.[20]​[21]​[22]​ Lighting was an important part of the competition between skyscrapers.[23]​.

André Fouilhoux's black Hood and American Radiator Building from 1924 in New York was used to experiment with lighting. Hood wrote in 1930:

The lighting designer, Bassett Jones, advocated a lighting scheme using shades of pink "Pink (color)"), scarlet "Scarlet (color)") and amber "Amber (color)"):.

The building was eventually illuminated in amber. Even one critic who considered the building "theatrical to a degree that exposes it to a charge of vulgarity" said that "at night, when... the gilded top seems miraculously suspended one hundred and two hundred feet in the air, the design has a dreamlike beauty[25] Georgia O'Keeffe made a famous painting of it, American Radiator—Night (1927) in which she simplified the architecture and made the lighting white,[26] and The American Architect called the lighting "one of the views of the city. . . . The huge crowds that throng this district at night block traffic."[24]​.

Illumination was very popular in American cities in the 1920s and 1930s, all the more so as electricity prices were cut by more than half.[19]​ It made cities look like a "fairyland" or a "dream city";[19]​ and edited out ugliness, such as the Niagara Falls power plant[27]​ or "poor or unsightly sections" which at night became "unimportant blank spaces" in a "purified world of light".[28] In addition to the World's Fairs, light festivals were popular in Europe from the second half of the 1920s, the most important being the one in Berlin im Licht) in October 1928.[29][30]​.

Authorities on both sides of the Atlantic had argued against the reduction of lighting and illuminated advertising signs during the First World War, despite the need to save fuel,[31] and upon taking power the Nazis immediately implemented floodlighting as part of their public buildings program that culminated in Albert Speer's Reich Chancellery of 1939, in addition to the effect of the Cathedral of Light in which spotlights were used to define the space itself in the building. Nuremberg Congresses.[32][33]​.

In Europe, the lighting of public squares in major cities was more important than in America, mainly 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,[34]​ and in 1912 Edith Wharton wrote home distressed that the city's monuments were illuminated at night, "torn from their mystery by the vulgar intrusion of illumination."[35]​ By contrast, like European cities hardly They had skyscrapers, lighting from inside the building or on its façade dominated the use of light in modern architecture to an extent that it did not in America. Some buildings used glass illuminated from the inside; for example, the 1907 extension of the Samaritaine department store in Paris, with glass domes,[36] and Erich Mendelsohn's 1928 Petersdorff department store in Wrocław, with ribbon windows illuminated by overmounted neon lights that were reflected onto the street by white curtains.[37] The emphasis on shiny, flat surfaces to simplify lighting helped spread the architectural vocabulary of the modernism.[38] Architects themselves drew attention to and embraced the greater importance of illuminated advertising, rather than the American approach of illuminating a skyscraper as "a gleaming holy grail" or "the dream castle of Valhalla" and ignoring the lettering possibilities of the "gigantic, widely visible wall surfaces."[39] Häring went so far as to congratulate "the destruction of architecture" by advertising:

His article, like other publications of the time, contrasts daytime and nighttime views of sample buildings. One of his examples was the remodeled façade of Arthur Korn's "Wachthof"&action=edit&redlink=1 "Arthur Korn (architect) (not yet written)"). A later, larger example is the Jan Buijs") of the Volharding Building in The Hague, where the elevator shaft and stair tower are glass bricks, illuminated at night, and the illuminated sign on the roof is surmounted by an illuminated shaft, but in addition the spandrels between the sheet metal windows are of opaline glass, behind which letters advertising the benefits of the insurance cooperative were mounted to be backlit at night.[41]​ In In 1932, Mildred Adams, writing in The New York Times magazine, described Berlin, which had not yet built a single skyscraper, as "the best-lit city in Europe" due to its "exhibition lighting [using] glass bricks and opaline glass."[42]​.

Another difference in the application of night architecture in Europe resulting from the lack of skyscrapers was that cinemas, such as Rudolf Fränkel's Lichtburg, Carlo Schloenbach's Ernst Schöffler, and Berlin's Carl Jacobi, were particularly striking examples of night architecture, often "the most striking [night] sights" in the cities.[43][44][45][46][47] In the case of UfA, this extended to the spectacular transformations of cinema facades to advertise certain films.[48]​.

A late example of European nocturnal architecture is Simpson's Department Store") in London, co-designed by László Moholy-Nagy, who also pioneered the art of kinetic light; he had recently published an essay on "Architecture of Light".[49]

The first era of experimentation with the architecture of the night came to an end with the Depression and the blackouts of World War II.[1][20][50] Walter Köhler's book on the concept, Lichtarchitektur, edited by Wassili Luckhardt, was not published until 1956.[51]​

In the postwar

In the 1950s and 1960s, outdoor lighting was again explored in architecture, which this time came to an end with the energy crisis of the 1970s.[1][52]​.

Immediately after the end of the war, lighting shows were used to celebrate the victory; For example, in Los Angeles on October 27, 1945, a hundred searchlights, each with a 16-foot color wheel, created a "crown of light" over the Memorial Coliseum, and the following summer, the "Victory Lighting" festival turned London into a "fairyland" with illuminated buildings, illuminated fountains, fireworks, and colored searchlight spectacles over the Thames.[53] light and sound "Son et lumière (spectacle)") began at the Chambord in May 1952, invented by Paul-Robert Houdin, who had apparently been inspired by the use of pre-war lighting at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition and on Paris monuments.[54] Le Corbusier and Yannis (1958)") in Brussels.[55]​ The use of night lighting in German cities such as Frankfurt immediately after the war was a different type of architectural application, indicating the intended shape of buildings, squares and streets not yet reconstructed "in a city that, by day, still looks more like a shanty town or a huge bomb site", as Gerhard Rosenberg observed in 1953.[55]​.

At first, the lighting of the new buildings was less of an architectural concern than before the war, as the uninterrupted facades of the International Style "International Style (architecture)") had no setbacks to facilitate lighting. New approaches were needed; buildings such as Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill's Manufacturers Trust Bank Branch Building on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, completed in 1954, and the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson, and Ely Jacques Kahn Seagram Building, completed in 1958, used glass walls and luminous ceilings to create a "tower of light," an update of the technique of transillumination, i.e. illuminating the building from within, that had been developed in Europe in the 1920s.[22][55][56][57] Ada Louise Huxtable wrote of the Manufacturers Hanover Building: "The whole, seen from the outside, is no longer architectural in the traditional sense: it is a design, not of substance, but of color, light and movement."[58]

That same year, Carson & Lundin's Tishman Building created a "light tower" in a very different way, updating the American tradition of exterior lighting: Abe Feder's lighting design used mercury vapor lamps to evenly illuminate the aluminum facade and thus recreate the daytime appearance of the building, with the accent of the address, "666", highlighted in red neon at the top.[59] Architects and critics rediscovered the possibilities of light, apparently unrelated to pre-war debates. For example, also in 1958 an editor of The New York Times declared that "illumination [as] an art that combines function and decoration" was "one of the great advances of recent years in architecture."[60] Gio Ponti condemned illumination as "primitive and barbaric" and predicted "a new nocturnal city":.

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;[62]​ Walter Gropius and Pietro Belluschi's Pan Am Building was influenced by its form but used floodlighting at night.[55]

The development of signage "spectaculars" in Las Vegas also began after World War II, moving beyond those in New York's Times Square (which, in any case, were increasingly reliant on floodlights and less able to compete with the growing neon and backlit street-level signage)[63]​ toward three-dimensionality, so that the architecture of the Strip "[became] symbol in space, rather than form in space."[64]​ For 1964, Tom Wolfe noted that "signs have become the architecture of Las Vegas"; He later called them "electrographic architecture."[65]​[66]​ Also in 1964, lighting designer Derek Phillips criticized this nocturnal architecture of signage as misleading:

There were some experiments with colored lighting in the 1960s, such as the 15-minute sequences of changing colors in the Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport, which replaced the initial static lighting with amber lighting.[68]

Recent night architecture

The latest resurgence of interest began in 1977, with a revival of spotlight lighting.[1][69] Color has been a major concern, with the use of computerized sequences and, increasingly, large LED screens.[70][71] The upper floors of the Empire State Building were illuminated from 1964 to 1973; On October 12, 1977, with a new lighting installation by Douglas Leigh"), they were illuminated in blue and white to celebrate the Yankees' victory in the World Series, and since then the building has been illuminated in different colors to celebrate various holidays and other special occasions,[69][72] despite Paul Goldberger's objections that the colors "turn it into a toy".[73] The Bank of America Tower by I. M. Pei and Harold Fredenburgh in Miami, completed in 1987, also changes color on holidays.[74]​ Modern computerized lighting can respond to external conditions, as in Toyo Ito's 1986 Tower of the Winds in Yokohama,[75]​ or perform other complex tasks, as in the façade installation of New York's Forty-Second Street Studios, where the color cycle accelerates throughout the week, cycling through changes slow on Mondays to changes every few seconds on weekend nights.[76]​.

Many modern examples of nocturnal architecture are associated with festival architecture, both in permanent settings such as John Johnston's Universal City Walk in Orlando, Florida (1999). (1999), or in temporary installations, for example works of art by John David Mooney such as Light Space Chicago 1977, with spotlights on the Chicago lakefront, and Lightscape '89, with colored lights and screens in the windows of the IBM Building in Chicago (on the occasion of the company's 75th anniversary). Temporary lighting was popular around the world, sometimes in combination with musical performances, as with the works of Jean Michel Jarre in Houston in 1986 and in the La Défense district of Paris in 1990.[70] Yann Kersalé has made both temporary installations (for example, at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1987, using rhythmically waxing and waning blue fluorescents under the glass dome to suggest a beating heart) and permanent collaborative works with architects such as Jean Nouvel and Helmut Jahn, for example, the Sony Center on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin (2000), where the office tower is illuminated with spotlights and the fiberglass membranes placed over the atrium are illuminated in a "daylight extension" each evening and then in a succession of sequences emulating the sunset until midnight, when the lighting turns dark blue until just before dawn, when it turns white until full daylight. day.[70]​[78][79]​ There were many spotlight 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 "World Trade Center (1973-2001)") are commemorated in twin shafts of white light is a comparable application.[80]​.

From its beginnings until the Second World War

Electric companies promoted the integration of lighting design into architecture, beginning with the World's Fairs at the turn of the century.[15] In the late 1920s, General Electric displayed building models at its Nela Park research facility in Cleveland to illustrate modern electrical advertising and building lighting, as well as street lighting, and both General Electric and Westinghouse built theaters in which to display cityscapes under different lighting conditions. lighting.[16]​.

The lighting of buildings and monuments, developed and perfected by lighting engineers such as Luther Stieringer and Walter D'Arcy Ryan at successive fairs, was encouraged as a way to display a city's most prominent buildings, especially skyscrapers: the first attempt to illuminate the Statue of Liberty took place in 1886, the top of the Singer Building was illuminated in 1908, the Capitol dome in Washington, D.C. during the First War World.[17] It was soon discovered that the angle and nature of the lights distorted the architectural features; In the same promotional publication as Hood's essay, Harvey Wiley Corbett argued for the building's form to take lighting into account from the beginning, in a continuation of changes that had already occurred, such as the removal of the cornice. "The shape of the illuminated part must be so linked to the rest of the building that it must appear like a jewel in an environment, forming a coherent part of the entire structure." The setback skyscraper form was best from this point of view, and Hood argued that classical architecture simply should not be illuminated.[18] Flood lighting also influenced the materials of many buildings: at the 1915 San Francisco World's Fair in San Francisco, a rough finish was used on the advice of Ryan to diffuse light and prevent glare,[19] and, In contrast, the 1921 Wrigley Building in Chicago was built with a pale terra cotta façade that became whiter and more reflective with increasing height, to maximize the effect of floodlight illumination.[20]​[21]​[22]​ Lighting was an important part of the competition between skyscrapers.[23]​.

André Fouilhoux's black Hood and American Radiator Building from 1924 in New York was used to experiment with lighting. Hood wrote in 1930:

The lighting designer, Bassett Jones, advocated a lighting scheme using shades of pink "Pink (color)"), scarlet "Scarlet (color)") and amber "Amber (color)"):.

The building was eventually illuminated in amber. Even one critic who considered the building "theatrical to a degree that exposes it to a charge of vulgarity" said that "at night, when... the gilded top seems miraculously suspended one hundred and two hundred feet in the air, the design has a dreamlike beauty[25] Georgia O'Keeffe made a famous painting of it, American Radiator—Night (1927) in which she simplified the architecture and made the lighting white,[26] and The American Architect called the lighting "one of the views of the city. . . . The huge crowds that throng this district at night block traffic."[24]​.

Illumination was very popular in American cities in the 1920s and 1930s, all the more so as electricity prices were cut by more than half.[19]​ It made cities look like a "fairyland" or a "dream city";[19]​ and edited out ugliness, such as the Niagara Falls power plant[27]​ or "poor or unsightly sections" which at night became "unimportant blank spaces" in a "purified world of light".[28] In addition to the World's Fairs, light festivals were popular in Europe from the second half of the 1920s, the most important being the one in Berlin im Licht) in October 1928.[29][30]​.

Authorities on both sides of the Atlantic had argued against the reduction of lighting and illuminated advertising signs during the First World War, despite the need to save fuel,[31] and upon taking power the Nazis immediately implemented floodlighting as part of their public buildings program that culminated in Albert Speer's Reich Chancellery of 1939, in addition to the effect of the Cathedral of Light in which spotlights were used to define the space itself in the building. Nuremberg Congresses.[32][33]​.

In Europe, the lighting of public squares in major cities was more important than in America, mainly 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,[34]​ and in 1912 Edith Wharton wrote home distressed that the city's monuments were illuminated at night, "torn from their mystery by the vulgar intrusion of illumination."[35]​ By contrast, like European cities hardly They had skyscrapers, lighting from inside the building or on its façade dominated the use of light in modern architecture to an extent that it did not in America. Some buildings used glass illuminated from the inside; for example, the 1907 extension of the Samaritaine department store in Paris, with glass domes,[36] and Erich Mendelsohn's 1928 Petersdorff department store in Wrocław, with ribbon windows illuminated by overmounted neon lights that were reflected onto the street by white curtains.[37] The emphasis on shiny, flat surfaces to simplify lighting helped spread the architectural vocabulary of the modernism.[38] Architects themselves drew attention to and embraced the greater importance of illuminated advertising, rather than the American approach of illuminating a skyscraper as "a gleaming holy grail" or "the dream castle of Valhalla" and ignoring the lettering possibilities of the "gigantic, widely visible wall surfaces."[39] Häring went so far as to congratulate "the destruction of architecture" by advertising:

His article, like other publications of the time, contrasts daytime and nighttime views of sample buildings. One of his examples was the remodeled façade of Arthur Korn's "Wachthof"&action=edit&redlink=1 "Arthur Korn (architect) (not yet written)"). A later, larger example is the Jan Buijs") of the Volharding Building in The Hague, where the elevator shaft and stair tower are glass bricks, illuminated at night, and the illuminated sign on the roof is surmounted by an illuminated shaft, but in addition the spandrels between the sheet metal windows are of opaline glass, behind which letters advertising the benefits of the insurance cooperative were mounted to be backlit at night.[41]​ In In 1932, Mildred Adams, writing in The New York Times magazine, described Berlin, which had not yet built a single skyscraper, as "the best-lit city in Europe" due to its "exhibition lighting [using] glass bricks and opaline glass."[42]​.

Another difference in the application of night architecture in Europe resulting from the lack of skyscrapers was that cinemas, such as Rudolf Fränkel's Lichtburg, Carlo Schloenbach's Ernst Schöffler, and Berlin's Carl Jacobi, were particularly striking examples of night architecture, often "the most striking [night] sights" in the cities.[43][44][45][46][47] In the case of UfA, this extended to the spectacular transformations of cinema facades to advertise certain films.[48]​.

A late example of European nocturnal architecture is Simpson's Department Store") in London, co-designed by László Moholy-Nagy, who also pioneered the art of kinetic light; he had recently published an essay on "Architecture of Light".[49]

The first era of experimentation with the architecture of the night came to an end with the Depression and the blackouts of World War II.[1][20][50] Walter Köhler's book on the concept, Lichtarchitektur, edited by Wassili Luckhardt, was not published until 1956.[51]​

In the postwar

In the 1950s and 1960s, outdoor lighting was again explored in architecture, which this time came to an end with the energy crisis of the 1970s.[1][52]​.

Immediately after the end of the war, lighting shows were used to celebrate the victory; For example, in Los Angeles on October 27, 1945, a hundred searchlights, each with a 16-foot color wheel, created a "crown of light" over the Memorial Coliseum, and the following summer, the "Victory Lighting" festival turned London into a "fairyland" with illuminated buildings, illuminated fountains, fireworks, and colored searchlight spectacles over the Thames.[53] light and sound "Son et lumière (spectacle)") began at the Chambord in May 1952, invented by Paul-Robert Houdin, who had apparently been inspired by the use of pre-war lighting at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition and on Paris monuments.[54] Le Corbusier and Yannis (1958)") in Brussels.[55]​ The use of night lighting in German cities such as Frankfurt immediately after the war was a different type of architectural application, indicating the intended shape of buildings, squares and streets not yet reconstructed "in a city that, by day, still looks more like a shanty town or a huge bomb site", as Gerhard Rosenberg observed in 1953.[55]​.

At first, the lighting of the new buildings was less of an architectural concern than before the war, as the uninterrupted facades of the International Style "International Style (architecture)") had no setbacks to facilitate lighting. New approaches were needed; buildings such as Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill's Manufacturers Trust Bank Branch Building on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, completed in 1954, and the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson, and Ely Jacques Kahn Seagram Building, completed in 1958, used glass walls and luminous ceilings to create a "tower of light," an update of the technique of transillumination, i.e. illuminating the building from within, that had been developed in Europe in the 1920s.[22][55][56][57] Ada Louise Huxtable wrote of the Manufacturers Hanover Building: "The whole, seen from the outside, is no longer architectural in the traditional sense: it is a design, not of substance, but of color, light and movement."[58]

That same year, Carson & Lundin's Tishman Building created a "light tower" in a very different way, updating the American tradition of exterior lighting: Abe Feder's lighting design used mercury vapor lamps to evenly illuminate the aluminum facade and thus recreate the daytime appearance of the building, with the accent of the address, "666", highlighted in red neon at the top.[59] Architects and critics rediscovered the possibilities of light, apparently unrelated to pre-war debates. For example, also in 1958 an editor of The New York Times declared that "illumination [as] an art that combines function and decoration" was "one of the great advances of recent years in architecture."[60] Gio Ponti condemned illumination as "primitive and barbaric" and predicted "a new nocturnal city":.

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;[62]​ Walter Gropius and Pietro Belluschi's Pan Am Building was influenced by its form but used floodlighting at night.[55]

The development of signage "spectaculars" in Las Vegas also began after World War II, moving beyond those in New York's Times Square (which, in any case, were increasingly reliant on floodlights and less able to compete with the growing neon and backlit street-level signage)[63]​ toward three-dimensionality, so that the architecture of the Strip "[became] symbol in space, rather than form in space."[64]​ For 1964, Tom Wolfe noted that "signs have become the architecture of Las Vegas"; He later called them "electrographic architecture."[65]​[66]​ Also in 1964, lighting designer Derek Phillips criticized this nocturnal architecture of signage as misleading:

There were some experiments with colored lighting in the 1960s, such as the 15-minute sequences of changing colors in the Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport, which replaced the initial static lighting with amber lighting.[68]

Recent night architecture

The latest resurgence of interest began in 1977, with a revival of spotlight lighting.[1][69] Color has been a major concern, with the use of computerized sequences and, increasingly, large LED screens.[70][71] The upper floors of the Empire State Building were illuminated from 1964 to 1973; On October 12, 1977, with a new lighting installation by Douglas Leigh"), they were illuminated in blue and white to celebrate the Yankees' victory in the World Series, and since then the building has been illuminated in different colors to celebrate various holidays and other special occasions,[69][72] despite Paul Goldberger's objections that the colors "turn it into a toy".[73] The Bank of America Tower by I. M. Pei and Harold Fredenburgh in Miami, completed in 1987, also changes color on holidays.[74]​ Modern computerized lighting can respond to external conditions, as in Toyo Ito's 1986 Tower of the Winds in Yokohama,[75]​ or perform other complex tasks, as in the façade installation of New York's Forty-Second Street Studios, where the color cycle accelerates throughout the week, cycling through changes slow on Mondays to changes every few seconds on weekend nights.[76]​.

Many modern examples of nocturnal architecture are associated with festival architecture, both in permanent settings such as John Johnston's Universal City Walk in Orlando, Florida (1999). (1999), or in temporary installations, for example works of art by John David Mooney such as Light Space Chicago 1977, with spotlights on the Chicago lakefront, and Lightscape '89, with colored lights and screens in the windows of the IBM Building in Chicago (on the occasion of the company's 75th anniversary). Temporary lighting was popular around the world, sometimes in combination with musical performances, as with the works of Jean Michel Jarre in Houston in 1986 and in the La Défense district of Paris in 1990.[70] Yann Kersalé has made both temporary installations (for example, at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1987, using rhythmically waxing and waning blue fluorescents under the glass dome to suggest a beating heart) and permanent collaborative works with architects such as Jean Nouvel and Helmut Jahn, for example, the Sony Center on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin (2000), where the office tower is illuminated with spotlights and the fiberglass membranes placed over the atrium are illuminated in a "daylight extension" each evening and then in a succession of sequences emulating the sunset until midnight, when the lighting turns dark blue until just before dawn, when it turns white until full daylight. day.[70]​[78][79]​ There were many spotlight 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 "World Trade Center (1973-2001)") are commemorated in twin shafts of white light is a comparable application.[80]​.