Greetings from outer space: Urban Lighting
Ball room lighting above shopping streets, light curtains on façades, chains of lights in parks and trees, skylines in Christmas glitter – every year cities and urban centres of all sizes turn into temporary light installations. However, looking at it from a distance, from outer space – it doesn’t need the holiday season. Our planet with its artificial lighting competes with stars millions of years old.On 21 October 1879, Thomas Alva Edison would have been surprised when he had eventually succeeded in heating a charred cotton thread with electricity in a vacuum glass flask until it started to give light. Only three years later 400 Edison lamps lit up the first neighbourhoods of New York City. Today the US alone spends more than two billion US dollars for lighting its public buildings. Twenty years ago the renowned Carnegie Institution had to shut down its observatory twenty miles off Los Angeles because the light above the nearby movie city not only grew faster than its population, but also outshone the distant stars.
Lighter, bigger, more colourful
There is no doubt that six billion people use a considerable amount of light. And that resources – like everywhere - are not distributed fairly and equally. Nor is there any doubt that our modern settlements are the way they are because of lighting in all imaginable forms – for functional purposes and design, always related to socio-cultural aspects.
Street lighting was one of the first accomplishments that not only provided comfort but also security and, obviously, status! Cities and neighbourhoods that could afford it changed their gas lanterns for modern electricity earlier than others, and everything became possible – lighter, bigger, more colourful.
City lights
Nowadays street lighting and traffic control are essential parallel functions that keep the structures of urban settlements going. High tech controls traffic to avoid jams in its arteries, allowing not only mobility and movement, but also ensuring quality of life. More light, fewer accidents, more light less criminality – these are the basic equations used by city planners.
Light as a supporting element in urban planning started at least with the large world fairs of the 19th century, considered as experiments in modern lighting architecture. The Paris Eiffel Tower was a pioneer light house in 1889 and in the 1920’s illuminated facades became the fashion.
Ever since, architecture cannot do without lighting at night. Streets, squares, industrial plants, office buildings or satellite towns – light is used today because of its spatial qualities with equal regard to structure and orientation. Aesthetics combined with advanced (LCD) technology generate truly powerful landmarks, visible from afar and easily identifiable.
In Vienna, for instance, the insurance company UNIQUA, when introduced as a new brand to the market in 1999, had one goal: to make corporate identity visible in the design of its new headquarters. The concept by Heinz Neumann, resulting from an international competition, successfully realised these goals with a marked architectural language of its own and a spectacular media facade (lighting planned by Licht Kunst Licht, Bonn and Berlin). No doubt – the abstract and concrete images give the face of the UNIQUA tower additional life and present a consistent image to the outside world. And it is no concidence that the UNIQUA Tower has recently been awarded the "Bauherrenpreis 2006".
Light and Shadow
As much light also causes much shadow this interaction must always be considered. Our language even has terms like activists and terrorists for people concerned with shielding from light. Under Germany’s Federal Law on Emissions, uncontrolled light has been defined as hazardous, like noise and fumes. It is not only a waste of energy, but, as critics claim, also disturbs the private sphere, it is a nuisance, distorts the landscape and damages the environment. Indeed, the latter is easy to prove – with 40,000 insects in Europe alone whose vision depends on darkness.
In the last few months, even the Municipality of New York City and the Audubon Society for Animal Protection ran a campaign by the name of "turn off the light", trying to convince owners and renters of high rise buildings of more than forty storeys to switch off the lights inside and outside after midnight to protect migrating birds.
The Chysler Building followed the call. But by the end of the birds’ migrating season at the latest, the lights will be on again, much to the joy of thousands of tourists, a nuisance to astronomers, for whom the sky is polluted on earth...
Brigitte Schedl-Richter
