A £31m plan to transform the Thames at night with ever-changing lighting of 14 of its bridges will bring out the beauty of these quirky London landmarks
Light, rather obviously, is the thing that allows us to see shapes and colours. Which makes it somewhat fundamental to architecture: there wouldn’t be much point, without it, to architects troubling themselves with form and decoration. It also varies in tone, intensity, direction, contrast and colour, which means that the solid stuff that it illuminates changes with it. Yet it is oddly neglected in discussions of architectural beauty, especially in its artificial versions. The planning system has little to say about it. Planners might fret about window details and facing materials but there’s not much they can do if light blazes from a glass office block or developers bathe their apartment towers in lurid pink.
Streets and buildings are usually illuminated with little reference to designers, even though their lighting can profoundly change the perception and experience of a city, not to mention its safety and its environmental performance. Good lighting is also a fairly cheap way of improving the public realm, compared with creating buildings and parks and new squares. Illuminated River, an ambitious plan to transform the lighting of London’s Thames bridges for a minimum of 10 years, created by the New York-based artist Leo Villareal with the British architects Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands, shows how it can be done.
The lights respond to the movement of the ‘living breathing thing’ that is the river, and ‘mirror the activity around it’ Continue reading...
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