The Architecture of the Night: Highlights and Shortcomings

Artistic lighting projects are becoming increasingly popular today and offer an alternative to the random, undesigned, though often magical, clouds of light into which our cities are transformed at night. No aspect of the modern metropolis is more striking than its night-time presence, but often this has nothing to do with good design; for it makes a great difference whether structures are simply illuminated from outside or radiate light from within, thereby assuming an entirely different appearance from their daytime state. The craze for lighting is on the increase and with it, all the shortcomings of staged nocturnal architecture. More and more uplights and wallwashers illuminate the facades of buildings that would better remain cloaked in darkness. Evidently we are still only at the beginning of a new architecture of the night that will build on the metropolitan experience of the 20th century, extrapolating it in a finer, more sensitive, yet more direct, intelligent and convincing form.