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.
File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-E04492, Berlin, Neue Reichskanzlei.jpg|thumb|New Reich Chancellery, 1939 by Albert Speer, 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.