Interior Design | Architecture | Furniture

When we look at the New York City skyline after dark, we see an urban landscape particular to modernity, one in which the significance of each building is designated not by form or position, but by light. “Transformed by Light: The New York Night,” an exhibition coinciding with the centenary of the IESNA, celebrates this particularly American vision of the city. The show’s subject is especially fitting since, as historian Dietrich Neumann notes in Architecture of the Night: The Illuminated Building (Prestel Publishing, 2003), it was lighting engineers who encouraged architects to experiment with electric light at an urban scale in the early years of the twentieth century. Prior to the 1930s, architects seldom imagined their work illuminated at night. Only after architects like Raymond Hood picked up on the research of engineers, such as Walter D’Arcy Ryan, did the nighttime skyscraper skyline attain its iconic status. (more…)