NOT ALL SHADOWS FALL

THE SAME
a conversation between Satu Streatfield

and Casper Laing Ebbensgaard

Casper Laing Ebbensgaard: What are some of the biggest challenges you face through your work as

a lighting designer?

Satu Streatfield: The most interesting challenge

lies in coordinating efforts across public and private land. The majority of the lighting design we see

in cities is private; even some of the lighting that appears public is privately owned and maintained. You can often spot where an area or street falls under private ownership; the lighting is more coordinated, and you get less of that messiness that naturally emerges at night. Private tenants and big landowners and developers in London have the resources and control to implement expansive lighting strategies, so the overtly designed spaces reflect private interests. Essentially, it creates ghettoes of luxury lighting that appear remarkably different to their surroundings. I walked around Stratford the other night and the privately-owned residential developments have bespoke lighting

for each plot. It feels like walking around a lighting showroom or a trade fair, without any continuity. Each one is trying too hard and it ends up creating these weirdly overdesigned and disjointed campuses. It doesn’t feel like London at all to me. Local authorities struggle to afford lighting design beyond basic streetlighting and a number of them are locked into Private Finance Initiative contracts (PFIs) where a contractor implements one-size-fits-all solutions, using standardised streetlighting that floodlight spaces uniformly in the name of safety, security, and risk mitigation. In these types of arrangements, the contractor has no motivation

to tailor the lighting, to think about the character and the experience of the space at night, so it results in over-lit and soulless streets.

CLE: The challenge of balancing the interests of private and public stakeholders obviously requires structural change, but also a much better understanding of how different forms of light correspond with different forms of life at night?

SS: Absolutely, it requires a much deeper understanding of the uses of the city at different times and a much more fine-grain control of the lighting; our lighting systems should be much better joined up. Across the City of London, for example, the local authority has introduced a progressive street lighting control system, which gives them control over each streetlight. Their experimental approach enables them to test and tailor the lighting to respond to the metabolism of spaces.

I went on a tour with their streetlighting engineers one evening when all the bars, offices and shops were packed and they dimmed the streetlights from 100% to zero and no one batted an eyelid. Nobody noticed the streetlights were turned off. It poses the question about how public and private lighting might work better together and with sensitivity towards the uses of spaces. We could get away with reducing public lighting quite dramatically because there is so much streaming from private tenants already. And this is not a new idea: in Medieval London each household was responsible for lighting the space outside their property and streetlights were not turned on during full moon. In town centres its similar. Restaurants, bars, shops and pubs create a series of outdoor rooms that spill

onto the street, encouraging a similar kind of custodianship towards their frontage. We could

do more and think more ambitiously about the potential in that. When I am walking around London at night, it is the glow from windows and building entrances, buses and bikes moving around that makes it so cinematic. When the street lighting

is overly dominant it kills off that vibe.

CLE: So what is the design response to not overdesigning and over-specifying spaces at night?

SS: It is extremely important to knit new developments into their surroundings properly. Often, the visualisations that are produced as part of a design brief fade the context out, creating a black canvas on which the proposed design really stands out. That is obviously very misleading—our perception of light is always relative to context.

We have to think more seriously about context and embrace the messy patchwork of the street scene

as a condition for producing lighting design proposals. This is why the City of London control system is so interesting, because it’s more about how you choreograph that patchwork to maintain

a good balance, almost like a DJ—and less like an architect—creating symphonic cohesion. Allowing the night to breathe a bit.

CLE: Is this not what light master planning aims

at doing, coordinating the transitions between differently lit spaces better?

SS: What makes the image of urban night-time

so special is that it’s an ever-shifting collage

of collective light, where boundaries blur and something else appears. So, the point is that

a huge part of any lighting strategy requires not just suggesting what is lit and how, but getting buy-in from different public and private lighting owners

to better coordinate efforts and be sensitive and frugal with their lighting. People often design in silos without much attention to what’s already there. Lighting designers and engineers spend

hours toiling over achieving certain numbers of illuminance and uniformity, but those numbers never appear in reality because of the light next door. I worked on a lighting scheme for a public square once, which was designed to be lit at very low levels, 2 lux, from one side to allow for a darker and calmer space. When we turned up a giant TV screen had been installed, which flooded the entire space with animated, coloured light.

It is important to develop a more collaborative design approach and a lot of that comes from building more serious partnerships with local stakeholders and fostering a sense of custodianship of public space at night. Whether people go out for leisure, work or whatever, they rely on active spaces to feel safe, and that comes from the inside-out more than during the daytime. I don’t think the solution to ensuring safety and comfort at night

can be done by just adjusting the lighting, lighting up shop windows or leaving hallway lights on.

It needs to emerge through a genuine partnership that configures the nocturnal city as a lived space. All the conflicts that are foregrounded in night-time planning and design, around safety, security, noise complaints, people out getting pissed, you cannot fix through design. You can mitigate, but you can’t solve it.

CLE: Essentially, you’re proposing to move away from lighting design proper to instead thinking about nurturing relations and communal ties as, somehow, bearers of night life?

SS: The idea of designing or curating the urban night with lighting alone is kind of nuts. The idea that you can eliminate deep-rooted problems of social inequality through aesthetic tinkering

is nuts. Lighting design is super important in urban environments, but the end goal is not necessarily what the lighting looks like but the kinds of relations it engenders.

CLE: How does that kind of attention to the night extend into the vertical city? How do you approach verticality it as a designer?

SS: There is a delight in seeing the random occupancy of the upper floors of residential buildings at night. It is one of my favourite urban lighting effects. All these characters revealing themselves in a random array, all stacked on top

of each other without any coordinated effort.

That kind of uncoordinated effort works because

the light is internal and often filtered through curtains, and people don’t light their living spaces like offices or supermarkets, so it gives a much subtler light. And you have different colours, different levels, flickering and moving. It’s just beautiful and the thing about it is that it appears ‘naturally’. The tension between order and disorder incidentally plays out across the façade of the

tower block. But this organic modularity of life

in the heights is under threat from ‘lighting design’ itself. Increasingly, residential high-rise buildings

in London are introducing vertical and horizontal stripes of light on their façades and it feels incredibly contrived—as if trying to make up for

a lack of activity inside. That’s just sad. I think the ability to integrate LED lighting more readily into structures and to accentuate and enhance long, continuous lines is producing some very expensive and equally pointless lighting schemes. Instead of adding lighting to buildings and structures we should design from the inside out, use the interior lighting to create the building image—which is what Richard Kelly did in the 1950s.

But the vertical city is not just residential, the other day I passed a church where someone had whacked a floodlight onto the roof to light the spire, just from that one side. Not the most refined method, but it gave a beautiful, cinematic chiaroscuro effect. More incidental. I enjoy single source lighting for features, because it gives a kind of directionality to the object, like sunlight. In sunlight all shadows fall in the same direction and there is a sense that the light is radiating from a point and fading over distance. In most contemporary architectural lighting, the temptation is to hide LEDs at every level, to describe the architectural design in detail and be faithful to its intended hierarchy. I don’t mind architectural lighting but

I think lighting designers should challenge themselves to use fewer mounting points and fittings, and work with the interior lighting more—think about the lit façade as a backdrop to activity on the street, and an emitter of light through window apertures, rather than describing every detail of an architectural design.

BROKEN LIGHTS

by Casper Laing Ebbensgaard

and Rut Blees Luxemburg

Cities are filled with them. Their ubiquity is testament to their almost faultless performance, functionality and unrivalled durability. And they are remarkably alike. Products of a ‘modernist’ urge for maintaining the semblance of ‘order’ through material consistency. They are products of the powerful principle of standardisation—the uniform appliance of technologies to maintaining a certain level of ‘quality’ across differential space.

Street-lamps, flood lights and bulkheads make up the majority of the lights we encounter in the city, yet often, they get relegated to pure functionality with little consideration of their potential qualities. Maybe that is due, in part, to their serial repetition, inviting comparison and scrutiny of their semblance of seamless application. The very same bulkheads that are mounted on council estates, according to principals adopted from Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, are fixed to the hoardings surrounding construction sites that give rise to the new additions to London’s skyline.

At night the surfaces of the city start to crack,

light seeps through its fissures and leaks through

its crevices. The boundaries that maintain bodies within predictive patterns of movement and mooring are rendered porous and more unstable once darkness falls. The fourth volume of The Dark Preview explores how the encounter with ‘broken’ lights in the vertical city offers a new language for nocturnal illumination that challenges conventional approaches to managing life at night.

Adam Glibbery

FUTURE IMPERFECT: DARK CITY DREAMING
by Nick Dunn

We dream in darkness. So, what of the nocturnal city and its capacity for the imagination? As our cities become lighter and brighter, where and when can we envision the future city? Light has become synonymous with progress. It is philosophically bound to ideas of wisdom, goodness, and coherence.Yet light and dark are deployed across urbanl andscapes in different ways including associal control and as symbolic of power. As justification for artificial light at night centres around its economic cost, how do we engage with the other impacts its increased presenceis having. Considered from a different angle, how might we determine the value of darkness in urban situations where access to it is rapidly disappearing. This article exploresthe potential for urban places after dark as a means of thinking and moving through processes of change that could lead towards a more sustainable, diverse, and nuanced futurecity. It takes an approach that rejects notions of completeness and the stretch of the everyday into the nocturnal hours, in favour of enabling the ‘everynight’ to be legible. In doing so, it aims to present a preview of the city at night as a future landscape that is in a process of becoming.

Walking along from the city centre and up Cheetham Hill Road, the eerie quiet and lack of urban buzz due to the national lockdown is palpable. Cars and bike couriers move people and food around the city’s circulation system. By Manchester Oratory St Chad’s the illuminated stained glass window melds with the late evening sky, capturing its bruised hues in its crystalline fragments. Crossing over and moving down Chatley Street, the roads here all seem to be held together by the background drone of the city beyond. The width of the streets and the style of architecture whispers more of small-town Middle America than urban centre of North West England. In some ways it is the frontier, still fending off the forces of gentrification and regeneration. Thanks to the bulwark of the prison, human activity around this part of the city is all the more conspicuous for its general absence. This is the muffled soundtrack of furtive and illicit movements and transactions, the slow crunches under rubber of the kerb-crawling car and the buzzes of vibrating mobile phones in hands setting up the next deal. The district around the prison is a micro-climate where many edges of urban activity overlap and coexist.

Small retail parks, wholesalers, and light industrial units soon bulk into view, their patchwork sheds offering discounted dreams and convenient parking. Behind these is North Street and a longer history of light industrial units stakes its way across the urban landscape. Wholesale clothes retailers, garages, electronics, textiles, materials, foodstuff. This is the utopia of demand and supply. It provides the city and the region with portals to the world through its procurement and logistics of goods and services. Electric light skims along the bottom of a steel door or illuminates the odd window but whatever clandestine operations are going on inside are not disclosed beyond its walls. The ghosts of intense and poorly paid labour hang heavy around here. Little gatherings of cigarette butts close to façade apertures rest quietly following a flick and then the arc of their flight from fingers. They are tiny reminders of the day before, spectres of routine and all-tootemporary recuperation. The sleeping hulk of a heavy goods vehicle lies hard against the kerb, its smell of rubber and dust telling tales of highways and byways near and far.

Its wide eyes and festive cabin lights sit forlorn, discharged from power. Arcing back again towards the main thoroughfare of Cheetham Hill Road, along which cars and trucks shift toand from the urban centre, their bright white headlights growing and blood red rear lights dissipating into the long avenue.

Turning back into the city centre, it is striking how being hidden in plain sight, Cheetham Hill is both a promise and premise. It offers countless opportunities for reinvention in its environs and the ability to have encounterand exchange with a diverse and mobile set of cultures and identities. Its steadfast refusal to acquiesce to the planned power of the city and the latter’s ongoing quest for an urban renaissance of renewal has led to its character as much as the forces of late capitalism have shaped its offer of cheap and counterfeit goods, shady operations, and both legitimate and illicit provisions to the wider population. With the return of LED-illuminated hues inthe sky, the very radiance of the city centre, it is time to leave the early hours of the urban landscape behind for another night.

When we think about the future of cities, it isdifficult to ignore the many visions produced for urban places which communicate clean, green and daylit environments. Where darkness is present is such visions it is usually employed to shape the depiction of a foreboding future that is dystopic, dirty and dangerous. However, I contend that it is in the city at night where we can find fertile opportunity for imagining how places can change. The absence of natural light and the sharp rendering of the cityscape into shadow due to artificial lighting changes the character of places, even those with which we are familiar. The result is often an uncanny but also sometimes radically different realm from its daylit sibling. It is the dark twin of the city. It is both psychological and physical. If day is the rehearsal, night is the performance. The nocturnal city awaits our wander and wonder. It is the temporary city where identity can be reinvented and this includes places. For at night, amidst the urban shadowlands,the ghosts of the past leak out of the city’s cracks and pores while the future appears in fleeting glimpses, sneak peeks of what the city might become. To experience the city at night is to be immersed in a landscape of greater possibility than in the daytime, where the characteristics of place can appear more open and provisional than during the rhythms, routines and regulations of the day. As light pollution now presents a global challenge, recognising the diversity of interplay between light and dark is critical in moving towards an overall goal where its impacts on human and non-human bodies can be tackled in a local and situated way through creativity, commitment and action. For this to be effective and bring about the change that is needed through responsible design, we need to more accounts that embrace the future imperfect by understanding the different relationships and values of urban places after dark. Now more than ever we all need to engage with dark city dreaming.

Painting by Sam Greasy

Site by Daniel Wilkinson AKA NIFF Books