page_title: Architecture of the night
section_title: Recent night architecture
hierarchical_section_title: Architecture of the night / History / Recent night architecture
caption_attribution_description: English: D-Tower by Lars Spuybroek and Q.S. Serafijn, night view
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: The latest revival of interest began in 1977, with a revival of floodlighting. Color has been a major preoccupation, with computerized sequences used and, increasingly, large LED screens. The upper stories of the Empire State Building were floodlighted from 1964 to 1973; on October 12, 1977, using a new lighting installation by Douglas Leigh, they were lighted in blue and white to celebrate the Yankees' World Series win, and since then the building has been lighted in different colors to celebrate a variety of holidays and other special occasions, despite the objections of Paul Goldberger that the colors "turn [it] into a toy". I. M. Pei and Harold Fredenburgh's Bank of America Tower in Miami, completed in 1987, also changes colors on holidays. Modern computerized lighting can respond to external conditions, as in Toyo Ito's 1986 Tower of Winds in Yokohama, or execute other complex tasks, as in the installation on the facade of the Forty-Second Street Studios in New York, where the color cycling speeds up throughout the week from slow changes on Mondays to changes every few seconds on weekend nights.
  Many modern instances of architecture of the night are associated with festival architecture, both in permanent environments such as Universal City Walk in Orlando, Florida, by John Johnston (1999), or in temporary installations, for example art works by John David Mooney such as Light Space Chicago 1977, involving searchlights on the Chicago lakefront, and Lightscape '89, involving lights and colored screens in the windows of the IBM Building in Chicago (on the occasion of the company's 75th birthday). Light festivals are once more popular, and in the 1980s and 1990s, such temporary illumination was popular worldwide, sometimes in combination with music performances, as with works by Jean Michel Jarre in Houston in 1986 and in the La Défense district of Paris in 1990. Yann Kersalé has produced both temporary installations (for example at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1987, using rhythmically waxing and waning blue fluorescents under the glass dome to suggest a beating heart) and permanent works collaborating with architects including Jean Nouvel and Helmut Jahn, for example the Sony Center in Potsdamer Platz in Berlin (2000), where the office tower is spotlighted and the fiberglass membranes tented above the atrium are lighted in an "extension of daylight" every evening and then in a succession of sequences emulating sunset until midnight, when the lighting becomes dark blue until shortly before sunrise, when it becomes white until full daylight. There were many searchlight displays in association with the end of 1999 and the beginning of 2000, and the Tribute in Light in which the twin towers of the World Trade Center are memorialized in twin shafts of white light is a comparable application.
caption: D-Tower, Doetinchem, The Netherlands, 2004, by Lars Spuybroek and Q.S. Serafijn, indicating love as the dominant mood of citizens
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