Art, design, theory and practice are intertwined in my world of illumination. In Painting with Light, one of my first lectures in the early 1990s, I presented an interdisciplinary approach to lighting. Here, to accompany the movie, Night City, is an elaboration upon a public lighting theory and a professional method that I have developed through observation, discussion, and practice.
Observation includes the derive – urban wandering or drifting without destination in which the environment is fully experienced and absorbed. This concept was invented by the radical French theorist Guy Debord and the Situationists in the 1960s. My own version of the derive, the light walk, was developed with New School/Parsons School of Art architecture and lighting students in parallel with a creative NightSeeingMapTM. Discussion includes my global lectures in which the question-and-answer session is as important as the talk itself. Practice, also global, is comprised of the art installations and public lighting designs that my staff at Light Projects and I have conceptualized and implemented for close to twenty years.
The urban nighttime environment presents a dark “canvas” for lighting designers to synthetically extend our previously daytime-oriented mind and body “clocks” into the night. Public lighting designers work with teams of architects, engineers, landscape architects and other designers – with the objective of illuminating city structures and streets for visibility, identity and safety and, wherever possible, as a catalyst for social space.
Ideally, before actually creating a lighting design, a government, a municipality or central business district agency conducts an urban-planning/design phase with a design team and stakeholders (space users, local owners and other urban inhabitants). A comprehensive light plan or lighting guideline document is developed to determine criteria for illuminating structures and public spaces. At this intersection of lighting and urban design, the uses of buildings as well as pedestrian and transportation patterns are taken into account. Streetscape design – street alignments, curbs, medians and street furniture – sets the stage for public lighting. As distinct from utility lighting, creative and integrative lighting expose the built environment at night-promoting legibility (“Where am I”?), patterns of use and in general encouraging public connections and conversations, more foot traffic and a richer public life.
I made the movie Night City as a way of revealing urban illumination concepts developed in concert with urban designer Brian McGrath. Through a guided nighttime walk, Night City conveys our public lighting theory that classifies illumination through its “sponsors”: public agencies and private owners which provide the primary sources of light; and found sources, which consist of displays, signs and markers – generally privately-owned – that illuminate public space unintentionally.
More specifically, public lighting is what a city or utility provides for basic safety lighting for roads, parks and illumination of publicly-owned structures. This system is augmented by private sources of lighting – including shop windows, displays and building facades whose purpose is identity or commerce, but which also benefit pedestrians in terms of safety, wayfinding and a general heightening of the collective mood by casting light on the sidewalk. In the category of found lighting, there are the emergent systems of “unplanned” lighting added, deliberately or otherwise. This can include sources, small and large scale and as various as string lights, phone booths, bus shelters, lit billboards, the blinking lights on automatic teller machine and even the shimmering glow cast by headlights of passing cars.
The six-minute Night City is a portal into the city after dark, inviting the viewer to observe and investigate first-hand a variety of public, private and found light sources in locations throughout New York City’s Greenwich Village.
This interplay of primary and incidental light-forms comprises the crucial elements of our cities’ nighttime illumination. Through basic understanding of these interlocking design systems, lighting designers and urban designers can analyze the existing after-dark experience and build on it to create a friendly and inspiring public realm.
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