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Article
Freelance
2016
Article
Freelance
2016
STREET [LIGHT] SCAPE
This article explores the lack of design and imagination put into illuminating our urban landscapes. As a thought experiment, a poem by T.S. Eliot is used as a metaphoric time capsule that touches multiple issues and arguments for a reconsideration of street light design.
The essay argues that the design of how our cities are lit should be reconsidered, not reduced to simply illuminating space but also creating atmosphere and allowing darkness into our cities.
The essay argues that the design of how our cities are lit should be reconsidered, not reduced to simply illuminating space but also creating atmosphere and allowing darkness into our cities.
T.S. Eliot’s 1908 poem, ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, studies the city streets by night; the streetlamp acts as a medium for his ruminations. Today I can trace his footsteps, walking the same streets, studying the same light, despite the century that stands between us.
With a phenomenological approach a thought experiment is conducted, exploring ideas and arguments around concepts of society, control, atmosphere and time. It raises a discussion of how and whether street lighting should be redesigned for a contemporary context.
By day this city presents a multitude of places, each block crossed, each corner turned offers a new scene, a rich cosmopolis formed through interactions between built and living entities. However, as the sun dips beneath the city’s skyline this city’s diverse atmospheric tapestry begins to fray. The sense of place that is present during the day doesn’t follow into darkness. Perhaps it’s the lack of people - apart from those few streets occupied by bars and other nightlife - the city is instead forced to rely upon the city’s landscape to form an essence of place. These streets that are left unpopulated seem to be held in a lunar synthesis, no longer individually unique and instead bound as a single landscape lacking in diversity.
Junhani Palasmaa describes the contemporary urban landscape as ‘the city of the eye’, 1 where the passivation of bodily perception reduces the city to an ocularcentric perceptual paradigm.2 By night, the dependence upon what is visible is heighted, suggesting that the source of illumination is what causes this decay of place. Could it be the ubiquitous street lamp that reduces the city’s essence of place, lending it unable to respect or respond to the city’s identity.
Every street lamp that I pass is calculated, rationalized through the simple act of ridding the night of its darkness, disregarding the consequential aesthetic impact upon its urban setting and unreflective of the identity and sense of place that is present during the day.
Its divisions and precisions equally distribute a light that expands beyond this city. By writing about the night-light of this city, I’m in actuality writing about all cities, a globalized light. This lamplight binds the entire urbanized globe, an endless artificial veil that rotates with the earth, following night’s darkness without any consideration to context or locality.
With a phenomenological approach a thought experiment is conducted, exploring ideas and arguments around concepts of society, control, atmosphere and time. It raises a discussion of how and whether street lighting should be redesigned for a contemporary context.
By day this city presents a multitude of places, each block crossed, each corner turned offers a new scene, a rich cosmopolis formed through interactions between built and living entities. However, as the sun dips beneath the city’s skyline this city’s diverse atmospheric tapestry begins to fray. The sense of place that is present during the day doesn’t follow into darkness. Perhaps it’s the lack of people - apart from those few streets occupied by bars and other nightlife - the city is instead forced to rely upon the city’s landscape to form an essence of place. These streets that are left unpopulated seem to be held in a lunar synthesis, no longer individually unique and instead bound as a single landscape lacking in diversity.
Junhani Palasmaa describes the contemporary urban landscape as ‘the city of the eye’, 1 where the passivation of bodily perception reduces the city to an ocularcentric perceptual paradigm.2 By night, the dependence upon what is visible is heighted, suggesting that the source of illumination is what causes this decay of place. Could it be the ubiquitous street lamp that reduces the city’s essence of place, lending it unable to respect or respond to the city’s identity.
Every street lamp that I pass is calculated, rationalized through the simple act of ridding the night of its darkness, disregarding the consequential aesthetic impact upon its urban setting and unreflective of the identity and sense of place that is present during the day.
Its divisions and precisions equally distribute a light that expands beyond this city. By writing about the night-light of this city, I’m in actuality writing about all cities, a globalized light. This lamplight binds the entire urbanized globe, an endless artificial veil that rotates with the earth, following night’s darkness without any consideration to context or locality.
The city is rarely blessed by darkness. Along the reaches of the street I occasionally stumble across a dimly lit alcove or alleyway and become possessed by an uncontrollable draw to its shadow. Darkness has a way with the human mind. We have all lain sleeplessly and witnessed the busy darkness, retreating inside ourselves, allowing maniacal minds to fill the blackness between our eyes and the ceiling above. This darkness becomes an escape of both clarity and reality. In Andrezej Stasiuk’s, ‘Dukla’, he lyricizes such a feeling, describing a person as ‘naught but a mirror in which nothing is reflected…the mind is nothing but a match flame in the wind’.3 This metaphor of the mind being the light within darkness is also present in Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, where darkness invites illumination found through consciousness, contemplation and - resultantly - divinity 4:
‘So much the rather thou celestial Light/
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers/
Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mistfrom thence/
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell/
Of things invisible to mortal sight.’5
The attraction to these unlit elements of the city is an attempt to seek the self within the realms of the cityscape, to feed curiosity and conjure memories to understand these spaces. Instead this city presents itself with an artificial clarity, reducing nocturnal ambiguity into a streetscape of placid sterility; sanitised of shadow, of mystery, of reverie. The streetlamps have reduced the city of the night, over exposing the landscape to the point where ‘even the dark interior of the self is exposed and violated’.6 This lamp lit street, in all its clear relations, stifles a sense of individual thought entering this environment and dissolve the floors of memory that are otherwise tempted into the landscape though the mystery of shadows.
The streetlamps offer perceptual clarity and depth along the reaches of the street, presenting notions of definition within a controlled yet distanced world. Darkness however offers an intimate sense of uncertainty. Humanity’s relentless search for understanding and control of our environment allows the mind to make sense of the un-sensed and enigmatic. Physiologically, the imperceptible darkness is instead flooded with our consciousness in an attempt to order those spaces.7 Darkness mentally manipulates physical space in an attempt to understand it; a subjectively unique process defined by each individual ’s world schema - proposing that a darkened street can have an individual dialogue with each person who walks through its shadows.
‘So much the rather thou celestial Light/
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers/
Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mistfrom thence/
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell/
Of things invisible to mortal sight.’5
The attraction to these unlit elements of the city is an attempt to seek the self within the realms of the cityscape, to feed curiosity and conjure memories to understand these spaces. Instead this city presents itself with an artificial clarity, reducing nocturnal ambiguity into a streetscape of placid sterility; sanitised of shadow, of mystery, of reverie. The streetlamps have reduced the city of the night, over exposing the landscape to the point where ‘even the dark interior of the self is exposed and violated’.6 This lamp lit street, in all its clear relations, stifles a sense of individual thought entering this environment and dissolve the floors of memory that are otherwise tempted into the landscape though the mystery of shadows.
The streetlamps offer perceptual clarity and depth along the reaches of the street, presenting notions of definition within a controlled yet distanced world. Darkness however offers an intimate sense of uncertainty. Humanity’s relentless search for understanding and control of our environment allows the mind to make sense of the un-sensed and enigmatic. Physiologically, the imperceptible darkness is instead flooded with our consciousness in an attempt to order those spaces.7 Darkness mentally manipulates physical space in an attempt to understand it; a subjectively unique process defined by each individual ’s world schema - proposing that a darkened street can have an individual dialogue with each person who walks through its shadows.
Rhapsody on a Windy Night T. S. Eliot
Twelve o’clock.
Along the reaches of the street Held in a lunar synthesis, Whispering lunar incantations Dissolve the floors of memory And all its clear relations, Its divisions and precisions, Every street lamp that I pass Beats like a fatalistic drum, And through the spaces of the dark Midnight shakes the memory As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
Half-past one, The street lamp sputtered, The street lamp muttered , The street lamp said, “Regard that woman Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door Which opens on her like a grin. You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand, And you see the corner of her eye Twists like a crooked pin.”
The memory throws up high and dry A crowd of twisted things; A twisted branch upon the beach Eaten smooth, and polished As if the world gave up The secret of its skeleton, Stiff and white. A broken spring in a factory yard , Rust that clings to the form
that the strength has left Hard and curled and ready to snap.
Half-past two, The street lamp said, “Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter, Slips out its tongue And devours a morsel of rancid butter.” So the hand of a child, automatic, Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay. I could see nothing behind that child’s eye. I have seen eyes in the street Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool, An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.
I can’t help but contemplate an alternative urbanscape, where the city demonstrates a break from nocturnal uniformity. A city that tonight, invites the mind to wander the streets as much as the body. Streets of darkness that are seen through a minds eye, where through the spaces of the dark, the city was able to tempt consciousness into the landscapes through areas of ambiguity that test the mind.
As much as an unintelligible landscape is appealing to an individual, upon the scale of a city’s population this darkness becomes a metaphor for the lack of control and safety. The streetlamp is a latent and unbeknown device of public safety and societal supervision. Regard that woman who hesitates towards entering the night for fear of darkness. The streetlamp offers perceptual security, through both being able to see and be seen. Urban lighting enforces control through psychological prevention, as explained by Jan Gehl who suggests that street lighting acts not only an visual aid but has the illusion of friendliness and social direction8.
The security found from streetlamps is dependent upon the population to act as communal citizens to watch over one another. However following the correlation of forever developing technologies, the state of our city security is shifting from being communally observed to more autocratically monitored.
CCTV has become ever more prevalent and prototypes of security drones are no longer within the realms of science fiction. Crime itself has also responded to this coded evolution and contemporary criminal activities are instead lurking in the intangible and shadowed depths of the cyberspace. With crime and control notably shifting from the city’s hardware to software does that make our streets more safe? Is the city in a position where perhaps soon our streets shall become safe enough to wander amongst shadows and a hundred years of reign the streetlamp [is] muttered out of existence to instead become a redundant artifact.
As much as an unintelligible landscape is appealing to an individual, upon the scale of a city’s population this darkness becomes a metaphor for the lack of control and safety. The streetlamp is a latent and unbeknown device of public safety and societal supervision. Regard that woman who hesitates towards entering the night for fear of darkness. The streetlamp offers perceptual security, through both being able to see and be seen. Urban lighting enforces control through psychological prevention, as explained by Jan Gehl who suggests that street lighting acts not only an visual aid but has the illusion of friendliness and social direction8.
The security found from streetlamps is dependent upon the population to act as communal citizens to watch over one another. However following the correlation of forever developing technologies, the state of our city security is shifting from being communally observed to more autocratically monitored.
CCTV has become ever more prevalent and prototypes of security drones are no longer within the realms of science fiction. Crime itself has also responded to this coded evolution and contemporary criminal activities are instead lurking in the intangible and shadowed depths of the cyberspace. With crime and control notably shifting from the city’s hardware to software does that make our streets more safe? Is the city in a position where perhaps soon our streets shall become safe enough to wander amongst shadows and a hundred years of reign the streetlamp [is] muttered out of existence to instead become a redundant artifact.
What would happen if the world gave up the streetlamp and turned off a century of nightlight, would it affect the city as a place, as a population, as a society? Or is it possible that the necessity of the city’s illumination has been eternalized and the streetlamp has become a latent symbol of our society.9 A form that the strength has left has become an archetype so indoctrinated into the urbanscape that the city would appear incomplete without it.
Historically the streetlamp became prevalent amongst cities within the early 20th Century, unknowingly aiding and reinforcing the societal ideals and doctrines of modernism. Landscape architect Stig Anderson talks of the imbalance of the rational over the aesthetical, accusing modernism as its prime suspect.10 This over calculation of our world can be examined through the streetlamp; presenting a cityscape reduced to a mere quantity of functional light, resulting radical changes in sleeping patterns, due to an extension of the workable day that allowed people to do more with their lives, and thus believe they’re fulfilling a greater life. The externalization of the day within the city allowed it to become almost a factory yard. The street lamp awakens a city that never sleeps.
This endless ability to produce resulted in a commoditised society, where intelligible qualities of life were objectified into possessions. Trying to peer through lightened shutters the modernized population ‘want to see their lives, their objects, all they’ve accumulated’11 , if sight and light was lost by nightfall then so was the evidence of their lives, leaving a population with no existence of their world. Modernism led cities to ‘ward off little pieces of darkness and create islands of light on which we can see ourselves and the things that we have accumulated around us’.12 If streetlights were to be razed, could society’s material sentimentality that has seemed to consume the population for over a century be ready to snap?
This extinguishment of streetlamps shall redefine the night-time. Presently the moon has lost her memory of a nocturnal earth, as presently cities are trapped within a mimesis of midday, a sense of timelessness, perceived as an eternal atmospheric condition. Unphased by seasons, un-moved by time. The light lacks any notion of motion, becoming temporarily detached from time until the lull of morning seeps over the rooftops and extinguishes the sense of eternity.
Historically the streetlamp became prevalent amongst cities within the early 20th Century, unknowingly aiding and reinforcing the societal ideals and doctrines of modernism. Landscape architect Stig Anderson talks of the imbalance of the rational over the aesthetical, accusing modernism as its prime suspect.10 This over calculation of our world can be examined through the streetlamp; presenting a cityscape reduced to a mere quantity of functional light, resulting radical changes in sleeping patterns, due to an extension of the workable day that allowed people to do more with their lives, and thus believe they’re fulfilling a greater life. The externalization of the day within the city allowed it to become almost a factory yard. The street lamp awakens a city that never sleeps.
This endless ability to produce resulted in a commoditised society, where intelligible qualities of life were objectified into possessions. Trying to peer through lightened shutters the modernized population ‘want to see their lives, their objects, all they’ve accumulated’11 , if sight and light was lost by nightfall then so was the evidence of their lives, leaving a population with no existence of their world. Modernism led cities to ‘ward off little pieces of darkness and create islands of light on which we can see ourselves and the things that we have accumulated around us’.12 If streetlights were to be razed, could society’s material sentimentality that has seemed to consume the population for over a century be ready to snap?
This extinguishment of streetlamps shall redefine the night-time. Presently the moon has lost her memory of a nocturnal earth, as presently cities are trapped within a mimesis of midday, a sense of timelessness, perceived as an eternal atmospheric condition. Unphased by seasons, un-moved by time. The light lacks any notion of motion, becoming temporarily detached from time until the lull of morning seeps over the rooftops and extinguishes the sense of eternity.
Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.
The lamp hummed: “Regard the moon , La lune ne garde aucune rancune, She winks a feeble eye, She smiles into corners. She smoothes the hair of the grass. The moon has lost her memory. A washed-out smallpox cracks her face, Her hand twists a paper rose, That smells of dust and old Cologne, She is alone With all the old nocturnal smells That cross and cross across her brain.” The reminiscence comes Of sunless dry geraniums And dust in crevices, Smells of chestnuts in the streets, And female smells in shuttered rooms, And cigarettes in corridors And cocktail smells in bars.”
The lamp said, “Four o’clock, Here is the number on the door. Memory! You have the key, The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair, Mount. The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall, Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.”
The last twist of the knife.
The lamp hummed: “Regard the moon , La lune ne garde aucune rancune, She winks a feeble eye, She smiles into corners. She smoothes the hair of the grass. The moon has lost her memory. A washed-out smallpox cracks her face, Her hand twists a paper rose, That smells of dust and old Cologne, She is alone With all the old nocturnal smells That cross and cross across her brain.” The reminiscence comes Of sunless dry geraniums And dust in crevices, Smells of chestnuts in the streets, And female smells in shuttered rooms, And cigarettes in corridors And cocktail smells in bars.”
The lamp said, “Four o’clock, Here is the number on the door. Memory! You have the key, The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair, Mount. The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall, Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.”
The last twist of the knife.
This new city shall regard the moon, allowing the night sky to be visible again, revealing archaic calendars of star constellations that have since been veiled by light pollution. No longer shall the heavens look down at a city that mourns the night sky through mimicry. Galaxies and nebulas of dual carriageways and terraced estates reflect the muted skies they’re built beneath. A reintroduction of the annual celestial rotations and lunar illuminations shall regain an essence of nature, the ancients and spirituality within the streets of the city.
Rather than the radical tuning off of all streetlamps and reliance of nocturnal light, perhaps street lighting can just have a more considered approach. Buildings are built to complement the light of day, but by night there is the ability to reverse these roles. Offering the architect or urban planner the Promethean power of light to reconstruct the cityscape. Where light could be used to manipulate and misconceive surfaces, offering a richer aesthetic and a perceptual playfulness. Peter Zumthor is an architect who undeniably achieves a mesmerizing composition of light and space, describing his design approach:
‘I do not think of these lights that we make ourselves as an attempt to eliminate darkness, when I think of them as night-time lights, as accentuated night, as intimate illuminated clearings that we carve out of the darkness, then they can become beautiful. Then they can have a magic all their own.’13
Nocturnal cities of the future could grow with a new composition of light. One that responds to its environment or perhaps adapts to its users. This designed and considered street light can compliment and manipulate the night and the city, forming a diverse nocturnal landscape that is able to reflect and respond to concepts of place, society and time. The streetlamp can become an architectural device possessing the ability to manipulate matter and minds and create a richer experiential environment.
Rather than the radical tuning off of all streetlamps and reliance of nocturnal light, perhaps street lighting can just have a more considered approach. Buildings are built to complement the light of day, but by night there is the ability to reverse these roles. Offering the architect or urban planner the Promethean power of light to reconstruct the cityscape. Where light could be used to manipulate and misconceive surfaces, offering a richer aesthetic and a perceptual playfulness. Peter Zumthor is an architect who undeniably achieves a mesmerizing composition of light and space, describing his design approach:
‘I do not think of these lights that we make ourselves as an attempt to eliminate darkness, when I think of them as night-time lights, as accentuated night, as intimate illuminated clearings that we carve out of the darkness, then they can become beautiful. Then they can have a magic all their own.’13
Nocturnal cities of the future could grow with a new composition of light. One that responds to its environment or perhaps adapts to its users. This designed and considered street light can compliment and manipulate the night and the city, forming a diverse nocturnal landscape that is able to reflect and respond to concepts of place, society and time. The streetlamp can become an architectural device possessing the ability to manipulate matter and minds and create a richer experiential environment.
