page_title: Architecture of the night
section_title: From the beginning to World War II
hierarchical_section_title: Architecture of the night / History / From the beginning to World War II
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Louisiana State Capitol, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Turm leuchtet nachts und spiegelt sich im See.English: Louisiana State Capitol, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Tower lights at night, reflected in lake.Français&#160;: Capitole de l&#39;État de Louisiane, Bâton-Rouge, Louisiane. Lumières de la tour de nuit, refléte dans la lac.
context_page_description: Architecture of the night or nocturnal architecture, also referred to as illuminated architecture and, particularly in German, light architecture, is architecture designed to maximize the effect of night lighting, which may include lights from within the building, lights on the facade or outlining elements of it, illuminated advertising, and floodlighting.
  With the rise of artificial lighting in the 19th and 20th centuries, architects were increasingly aware of it as an element to be integrated into design; deliberate use of it has been popular at various times, including the design of skyscrapers and other commercial buildings in the 1920s and 1930s, in the 1950s and 1960s, and in modern festive city architecture.
context_section_description: Electrical companies promoted the integration of lighting design into architecture, beginning with the World's Fairs of the late 19th century. In the late 1920s, General Electric was exhibiting model buildings at its Nela Park research facility in Cleveland to illustrate modern electrical advertising and building illumination as well as street lighting, and General Electric and Westinghouse both built theaters in which to display streetscapes under differing lighting conditions. Floodlighting of buildings and monuments, developed and refined by lighting engineers like Luther Stieringer and Walter D'Arcy Ryan at successive fairs, was encouraged as a way to showcase a city's most prominent buildings, particularly skyscrapers: the first attempt at floodlighting the Statue of Liberty took place in 1886, the top of the Singer Building was floodlighted in 1908, the Capitol dome in Washington, D.C. during World War I. 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. "The form of the illuminated portion should be so tied in with the rest of the building that it should appear as a jewel in a setting, forming a coherent part of the entire structure." The setback skyscraper shape was best from this point of view, and Hood argued that classical architecture should simply not be floodlighted. 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, 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. Lighting was an important part of the competition between skyscrapers.
  
  Hood and André Fouilhoux's 1924 black American Radiator Building in New York was used for experimentation with illumination. Hood wrote in 1930:
  We tried multi-colored revolving lights and produced at one time the effect of the building's being on fire. We threw spots of light on jets of steam rising out of the smokestack. Then again, with moving lights, we had the whole top of the building waving like a tree in a strong wind. With cross-lighting . . . the most unusual cubistic patterns were developed.
   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.
   The building was eventually illuminated in amber. Even a critic who found the building "theatrical to a degree that opens it to a charge of vulgarity" said that "at night, when . . . the gilded upper portion seems miraculously suspended one and two hundred feet in the air, the design has a dreamlike beauty." Georgia O'Keeffe made a famous painting of it, American Radiator—Night (1927) in which she simplified the architecture and made the lighting white, and The American Architect called the illumination "one of the sights of the city. . . . The vast throngs that crowd this district at night are blocking traffic".
  Floodlighting was popular in American cities in the 1920s and 1930s, all the more so as electricity prices dropped by more than half. It made cities look like a "fairyland" or a "dream city"; and it edited out ugliness, such as the power station at Niagara Falls or "poor or unsightly sections" which at night became "now unimportant blanks" in a "purified world of light". In addition to the World's Fairs, light festivals were popular in Europe beginning in the se
caption: The Louisiana State Capitol lit up at night shortly after its opening in 1932; the lantern adorning the top was built to symbolize the "higher aspirations" of the State of Louisiana.[14]
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