Architecture of the night

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.

The German term Lichtarchitektur (light architecture) 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,[5] 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 (city crown), particularly among the members of the Gläserne Kette (Glass Chain).

"[10] And also that same year, Walter Behrendt devoted a section in his book Sieg des neuen Baustils (translated edition: The Victory of the New Building Style) 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 [of electric lighting] but also to design them, [whereupon] 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.

"[12] A British endorsement of the same concept, P. Morton Shand's Modern Theatres and Cinemas (1930), confines itself to external lighting but embraces advertising, which was to remain a point of contention:[N]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.

[13]Electrical companies promoted the integration of lighting design into architecture, beginning with the World's Fairs of the late 19th century.

[17] 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.

[18] 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,[19] 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.

[24] 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.

[28] 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.

Some buildings used glass illuminated from within; for example Franz Jourdain's 1907 extension to the Samaritaine department store in Paris, with glass domes,[36] 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.

[38] 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".

[42] 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 [nocturnal] sights" in cities.

[22][55][56][57] 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.

"[58] 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.

For example, also in 1958 a New York Times writer declared "lighting [as] an art that combines function and decoration" to be "one of the big advances in recent years in architecture".

[60] 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.

[61] 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.

"[65][66] 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.

[74] Modern computerized lighting can respond to external conditions, as in Toyo Ito's 1986 Tower of Winds in Yokohama,[75] 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.

[70] Yann Kersalé has produced 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 works collaborating with architects including Jean Nouvel and Helmut Jahn, for example the Sony Center in Potsdamer Platz in Berlin (2000), 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.