eight
artificial light, the great invention
Opposite page Electricity meters, Old Havana, Cuba.
Added Light: From Fascination to Precision
From ancient times until well into modernity, human beings have sought to fulfil a primordial need by means of light. The discovery of fire, the first source of light and warmth that they were able to control, was a transformative moment, and the invention of artificial light may be seen as the continuation of the same phenomenon. It must have seemed a repetition of the myth of Prometheus, in which man stole fire from the gods with the help of the eponymous Titan, and so was able to prolong the day – aiming, in a way, to loosen his dependency on the sun.
It is not surprising that in parallel with discoveries about the physical nature of light, research was done into producing artificial light – albeit with minimal results until the end of the 19th century. Until then, artificial light was confined to the dazzling effects of celebrations in Europe’s royal palaces. Architectural author José María Casal wrote of the lamps in the hall at Würzburg, in Imperial Austria: “With thousands of candles, and the huge amount of work involved, it is easy to see the limits of lighting for architectural interiors.”2
Figure 8.1 Light balls performance, La noche en blanco Madrid (White Night in Madrid) festival, 2006.
The development of gas production, its improvement and the growing availability of piped gas supplies unleashed a major advance in interior lighting. In 1880, the Austrian Carl Auer von Welsbach invented a commercially viable gas-mantle light: a “hood” of fireproof cloth that became incandescent when heated by a small gas-fed flame. But the really significant advance came with the electric incandescent lightbulb. It was invented simultaneously by British scientist Joseph Swan and US inventor Thomas Edison, but it was Edison who devised a complete system for supplying energy economically to this new and revolutionary source of light. The double advantage of the new system in comparison with gas lighting was that it generated less heat and no soot. It could also be installed in small spaces where gas lighting was not viable because of the heat it generated and its need for an air supply. Electric lighting thus significantly reduced the risk of fires and eliminated the blackening of ceilings from soot – and, crucially, was very simple to install and operate.
Nonetheless, several years were to pass before the electric light became widespread because of strong pressure from the gas industry. In London, for example, British parliamentary investments in the gas industry blocked the use of electric light in public thoroughfares for a time. In Madrid, electric street lighting was not introduced until 1929, although the ministry of war premises, the royal palace and various theatres in the Spanish capital had been lit by electricity since the end of the 19th century.3 Once the early legal obstacles had been overcome, however, the use of electric lighting expanded with dizzying speed – as did the number and importance of all the industries related to electrical production, even in times of economic crisis.4 The new discovery exerted a powerful fascination, and the electricity industry increased output year after year with the sole concern of flooding interiors with ever-greater quantities of this brilliant new light.
The first electric lighting system came into service in London in January 1882, and in New York at the end of the same year. Some idea of the enormous impact of the incandescent electric lightbulb may be gained from the fact that while all technological advances take a certain length of time to be applied to architecture, the use of electric lighting was planned for many buildings even before it was first installed in London. Normally, architects opt for prudence and let a trial period pass before incorporating new inventions into their proposals. This allows time not only for practical experimentation but also for intellectual speculation and discussion,
Fig. 8.2 The Wind Tower at Yokohama, Japan, 1986, by Toyo Ito.
in order to generate a climate in which the architectural application of a specific technological innovation is acceptable. In the case of electric lighting, this period was minimal.
In May 1882, John Slater, a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects, aware of the revolutionary nature of electric light, presented a paper warning of the risks of ignorance with regard to this new “servant”, ending with the solemn words:
In 1902, US scientist Louis Bell published The Art of Illumination with its basic advice on lighting. Much of it is still applicable today, such as his recommendation that different types of light should be used, to “serve the ends of art and convenience”.6 Casal notes that: “As early as 1882, Slater predicted that when architects learnt of the decorative possibilities of the new source of light, they would find in them all the requirements for perfect lighting.” However, there were frequent complaints about the misuse of the new equipment. Obsession with the quantity of light made people neglect the quality of the lighting that they were installing. The fascination produced by this new invention, and the incredible speed with which it spread, made it a potentially awesome power in the use of space. The spectacular, dazzling capacity of electric light led, in many cases, to a growing contempt for natural light because of the latter’s constant variability.
Creative Use of Light
The enormous influence of electric light on the avant-garde artistic movements is something that cannot be ignored. Electric light was, according to English architectural critic Reyner Banham, the greatest environmental revolution in the history of humanity since the taming of fire. It offered new possibilities in architecture and the plastic arts. No other device could change the appearance of shapes and mass to any comparable extent. The artistic vanguard quickly took up the possibilities offered by the new invention, as Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy showed in his book The New
Figure 8.3 Atrium, Galeries Lafayette, Berlin, 1996, by Jean Nouvel.
Vision. He contended that light, as “space-time energy” and its projection, contributes significantly to the progress of dynamic sculpture and the achievement of “virtual mass”.7 As a result of this research, Moholy-Nagy created his Light-Space Modulator. This was a sculpture of metal and glass worked by a motor, with a particular end in view: to capture the composition of light and to show the power that it has to modulate time and space.
It was understood by this stage that the emergence of ways of generating powerful artificial light would make it a major instrument in the creation of art, even though it had not yet attained its rightful place in that discipline. Photography revealed light’s fluidity, and its capacity to irradiate, penetrate, infiltrate and encompass. In addition, light is capable of creating negative designs, masses without light, which might in the future come to be as important and as universally appreciated as light reflection – their very antithesis – is today.
Moholy-Nagy dealt with the creative use of light under two main headings. Firstly, there were open-air light displays, which included illuminated noticeboards with linear designs on flat surfaces, giant reflectors, written texts and lightplay projected onto clouds or screens of gas. These were intended to be viewed from the earth or from an aeroplane, with surfaces and angles in constant transformation and an infinite network of multicoloured rays of light.
Secondly, he addressed light effects in interiors. These utilised film, with its as-yet unexplored possibilities of projection, with colour, plasticity and simultaneous showings – perhaps in the form of sequences of simultaneous images covering all the walls of a room. These artistic experiments also involved a coloured piano, its keyboard connected to a series of graduated lamps, which would light up objects made of special materials and combine designs with the colours. Finally, a light-fresco enlivened vast architectural units such as entire buildings with artificial light directed and manipulated according to a predetermined plan.8
Avant-garde artists were undoubtedly dazzled by the prospects offered by artificial light, and their works were sometimes prophetic of spectacles that would be on offer at later worlds fairs – beginning with the Electricity Pavilion in Paris in 1900, all the way to Seville’s Expo ‘92 and the Wind Tower at Yokohama.
Figure 8.4 Designed to be seen by night: Piccadilly Circus, London.
The last-named project, by Toyo Ito, comprises a concrete core covered in acrylic mirror panels and surrounded by an oval case of perforated aluminium. Inside are projectors, mini-lamps and white neon rings. By day, it looks like a plain metal cylinder. When night falls, however, the aluminium panels become a semitransparent membrane and the mirror panels reflect the light within the cylinder, reproducing in real time different patterns of light that move and change in response to the wind and the noises of the city. French architect Jean Nouvel also achieved spectacular effects in the Galeries Lafayette department store in the newly unified Berlin. The curved mirrors and reflected lights in its huge cone-like atrium become the main “players” in the interior space.
Until the 20th century, natural light was one of architecture’s basic “materials”. It was a given, an ally of the architectural project, which adapted itself to the movement of the sun and the different intensities of light in each place and time. The discipline involved an interplay of structures, materials and light. Since the last century, however, artificial light has become a new variable in architecture.
The use of artificial light has enabled buildings to be designed especially to be seen by night. Normal perceptions are thereby reversed, and what was an opaque box may transform into a lantern on an urban scale, such as Rafael Moneo’s Kursaal or Alejandro de la Sota’s project for the AVIACO competition both at San Sebastián.
Something similar happens in the interior of Alberto Campo Baeza’s Caja Granada Savings Bank. A large box rests on a plinth like a sculpture on a podium. Offices are arranged inside the grid-like cube on seven floors around a vast central courtyard. This is a true “impluvium of light”, a space which changes dramatically as light fluctuates. During the day, sunlight appears almost solid as it starkly illuminates the floor below. In the evening, the walls glow, as light from the offices radiates through semi-translucent alabaster.
Artificial lighting has also enabled advertising on a large scale, which in itself has contributed to the visual culture of cities, for example London’s Piccadilly Circus. Many old buildings began a new stage of their lives with the appearance of artificial light. They needed to incorporate a new lighting condition – what we might even call retrofitted lighting – in order to face the challenge of modernity, i.e. to
Figure 8.5 Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, Bankside, London, 2000, by Herzog & de Meuron.
serve the needs of people today, adapting to the functional, technical and other requirements involved in the use of each particular building.
A good example of the use of artificial light in restoration and rehabilitation is Herzog & de Meuron’s Tate Modern on London’s South Bank. This building, originally an electricity power station, was converted into a gallery of contemporary art in 2000. The interior accepts the challenge of displaying works of art by using both natural and artificial lighting, each strictly controlled. The original brick building at Bankside took on unexpected potency when a glass box was added to the top, crowning it with light.9 Similarly, the huge space of the interior is connected by “galleries of light”, like floating masses that offer a horizontal counterpoint to the verticality of this colossal industrial-era space. At Tate Modern, artificial light has been a powerful and essential instrument in the building’s restoration – and, as so often happens, it has been used by skilled architects to begin a new stage in the life of a historic building.
In other cases, where artificial light is used to update a heritage building that does not require substantial change, it needs to take a secondary role and respect the intentions of the original lighting scheme. Here, its mission is to reinforce the qualities of a particular space, in order to facilitate or improve the way in which it is perceived. However, all too often what is produced is a “deformation” of the space, which is changed in an uncontrolled way and which may lose its real value through the application of a mistaken exhibitionism.
Light Pollution
Considerable attention is now justly paid to the subject of noise pollution, an unknown concept until relatively recently. The same ought to happen with regard to light pollution, and there should be scientific concern for the lighting conditions of historic buildings or historic sites. UNESCO’s 1976 document, Recommendation Concerning the Safeguarding and Contemporary Role of Historic Areas, arising out of the worldwide heritage body’s 19th session, in Nairobi, Kenya, of that year, lays down the following general principle:
Figure 8.6 Dalbat fashion showroom, Granada, 2002, by A Jiménez Torrecillas.
The light pollution referred to in this section is caused by the lack of a scientific approach to the use of artificial light, shown in three basic ways: firstly, a love of spectacular brilliance, proceeding from the mistaken idea that increased quantity equals increased quality; secondly, the distortion of perception through the loss of shadow and shade; thirdly, inappropriate changes of colours. In the absence of a deep knowledge and understanding of the meaning of light in different eras of history, architects working on restoration projects risk turning spaces into museum pieces by displaying them in an clinical style. By doing so, they impoverish or even destroy the dialogue between light and shade that lies at the heart of each great work of architecture.
Those who pay a night visit to the Nasrid Palaces at the Alhambra in Granada can experience the careful lighting of its exterior spaces, such as the Courtyard of the Myrtles, where some white lights recreate the sensation of the light of the full moon. The interiors do not have museum-style high, even levels of lighting throughout, but are lit with a number of discrete lamps shedding indirect light in the main areas or passages. The rest is a penumbra, depending on the level of external natural light. When the eye adapts to this relatively low level of lighting, the full richness of this magical space, which is particularly enchanting by night, can be appreciated in the shadowy light. The oriental architecture, with its ingenious play on shapes, is sketched in and hinted at by the shadows on the reliefs. In the Alhambra, as in so many other historical buildings, very little light is needed in order to see the original essence of the space, and this would be ruined if standard lighting levels were applied.
Is it always necessary to light up every corner of a building, down to its very last stone, in order for it to be used correctly? Obviously not, within safety limits, and yet with regard to lighting people continue to fall into the error of confusing “more” with “better”. This apparent lack of concern for one of the things that exerts most influence on perception is hard to explain.
Perhaps one cause is the insouciance with which much artificial lighting was installed in the 20th century – and often still is today – meriting neither previous study nor any
Figure 8.7 Internal lighting is glimpsed through the windows of a building in the historic centre of Naples.
checks or controls, with the excuse that, after all, it will be easy enough to change back again should the need arise. This is a universal problem, as may be seen worldwide from countless tourist postcards of floodlit historical sites and “brilliant” monuments, which have lost all their evocativeness under the glare of halogen light.
The topic becomes more complicated in the case of museums or art galleries. Here, artificial illumination is often preferred to natural light because it is independent of external conditions and because its intensity, colour and direction can be fixed beforehand. However, to capitalise on the freedom allowed by these possibilities, the greatest precision should be employed with regard to both quality and quantity. Anyone can work out that optimum perception does not depend so much on the quantity of light as on the coherence of its shadows. One example is the artificial lighting in the chapel of Blessed Ludovica Albertoni (whose design was described in Chapter 6): a battery of spotlights beneath the hidden window now produces an effect of multiple shadows, greatly weakening the dramatic tension that characterises this work when lit by daylight alone. Something similar happens with the artificial lighting at the Ardeatine Caves memorial outside Rome, where the long, narrow aperture low down in the rock is lit with dazzling yellow spotlights, which reduce the expressive forcefulness of the original backlighting.
Artificial light is a useful instrument for bringing out all of a building’s theatrical, dramatic and even transcendent effects. However, primary attention must be given to the needs of the building, respecting its authenticity and giving that priority over the exhibitionism that sometimes aims to turn historical sites into theme parks. This happens when instead of seeing a street as a place for travelling along, it is seen as a stage set wherein the building fronts are treated as the scenery. This could be considered a form of modern light pollution – not in terms of quantity, as when excessive urban lighting prevents us from seeing the moonlight – but in terms of quality.
The lagoon-city of Venice seems to be a model example of urban lighting. It retains shadowy half-light as part of its “personality”, using gentle artificial lighting that is only intensified, in a carefully moderated way, on its major historical buildings. The lighting in the Piazza San Marco consists of diffusive globes, increasing the mystical character of the city’s atmosphere. However, behind Venice’s finished perfection, the city seems dead; almost no windows in the famous piazza are lit at night. Until morning, when the tourist shops will reopen, all signs of life have been extinguished. They are blank, hollow, empty – almost corpse-like.
Naples produces the opposite sensation. Unlike Venice, in Naples, nothing is perfect. It is a city of unpremeditated light, of strong shadows and contrasts. This light emanates from behind the clothes hung on apartment balconies; from windows, through which the ceilings of the rooms beyond can be glimpsed; from the interiors of courtyards.
This city – with all its languor, its carelessness and its contrasts – nonetheless gives an impression of harmony and strongly aesthetic emotion. Naples fulfils the first condition for any historic site: the root of its authenticity – it remains alive. Still more important than a city conserving the memory of the past is that it inhabits its own “pasts”, its buildings; to do this, their lighting has to be in accordance with this goal. Nonetheless, conservation work should not eschew contemporary architectural technology and techniques. In many cases, it will be possible to employ older techniques in restoring older buildings; however with regard to light the latest advances – for instance, the proliferation of LED lighting – also offer great advantages in comparison with restoration work undertaken even a few decades ago. Spanish architect Julio Cano Lasso once commented:
Today, historical sites, with all their symbolism and heritage, suffer from serious deficiencies that impede the functioning of the modern urban districts in which they find themselves. They risk becoming mere empty decoration, without continuity or conservation, because of two factors: on the one hand, general depopulation because of the lack of residential properties; on the other, the abundant availability of European Union or local funding for the ornamentation of historical sites. This funding often takes no account of the fact that, as Spanish architect Cesar Pórtela explains, “rehabilitation is not mere conservation, rehabilitation is fundamentally transformation, CHANGE, radical change that, drawing conclusions from the past by reading it and studying it, applies them validly to the present and the future”.11
Real tradition implies both being up-to-date and learning from heritage buildings, which, as Jacques Herzog puts it, “reveal many secrets to us if we are ready to listen to them and enter into the fascination that emanates from them”. However, Herzog also warns, “We have to be aware of the forces acting on the time we live in. Time is a reality that is part of the project.”12