Lighting Rittenhouse

Too White, Too Bright in the Square

Addison Street from 18th.

I'm starting this story on Addison Street because my underlying purpose here is to expand people's horizons when it comes to how we light the outdoors. Don't worry. I'll be getting to Rittenhouse Square very soon.

Addison Street is approximately two blocks from Rittenhouse Square. Quite a while ago now, the residents decided to wrap their trees with Christmas lights.  Currently the lights are on, as far as I can tell, around the clock and every day of the year. The bulbs are LEDs.

There are actually two regular street lights on this block. They're standard highway lights, very tall, with goose necks. These lights work well on highways, particularly Interstates, where they provide even illumination across large areas that are not obstructed by objects like trees, and where motorists can be relied on to be staring at the highway in front of them, and not trying to look up at the night sky.

On Addison, the two highway lights are almost invisible. If you look carefully at the picture above you can see one of them, hiding up among the trees in the background. There's a patch of pavement directly under that light that's a bit brighter than the surrounding street. 

The trees are basically eating the light from these two highway lamps, and much of the illumination on this block comes from the lights on the trees and the porch lights on the houses. 

 Mixing Light, Balancing Light

Let's have a look at how the tree lights work during the day - remember, they're on just about all the time.

I love the way the afternoon sunlight in this picture, painting the facades of the houses, receives a delicate complement from the bulbs wrapping the tree.

Mixing light from multiple sources goes on all the time. I don't think people necessarily think a lot about mixing sunlight with artificial lights, but frankly it also goes on all the time, and this is a particularly pleasant example. 

When mixing lights it's important to see that they're balanced. Balancing doesn't mean every light needs to be the same. It means the lights need to work together and not fight one another.

Afternoon on the Square

Let's have a look at how sunlight works on Rittenhouse Square. Mother Nature, and her buddy the sun, have been teaching humans about light for a very long time. And I think it's fair to say that the impulse behind artificial illumination is to extend some form of daylight into the hours and places of darkness.

I think Mother Nature does a particularly good job of lighting Rittenhouse Square during the day. In summer the dappled light, created by a collaboration of the sun and trees, creates a very pleasant effect.

The only lighting problem during the day lies on the south side of the square, which is largely covered in shadows cast by the tall buildings on that side. The area still gets quite a lot of use, just not very much from sunbathers.

As Day Turns to Night 

My favorite part of the day is the time around sunset, when the sun shows what a talented lighting designer it really is.

First, late in the afternoon, comes the golden hour, when the low sun floods planet earth with gorgeous, powerful, golden light. In this context, "hour" is a flexible term. And the golden hour doesn't happen every day - the weather needs to cooperate. But that just makes it all the more precious.

Sunsets can bring their own joys of course, but they tend to be hard to see from the square, so I'm not going to talk about them here.

Starting as the sun sets we have the blue hour. With the departure of the sun's rays, the surface of the earth needs to look to the sky for light, and that light is blue. (The sun is still shining up there.) So the earth becomes blue, and the people walking around are blue, although we know they're not really blue. 

At its best, the blue hour is a soft, subtle time before the sky goes a velvety black. Many of the pictures in this story were taken during the blue hour. I find they're just nicer pictures. Here's a shot of a building entrance on the south side of the square. 

I love the warm, even illumination of the canopy lights, and I'm very fond of the blue masonry in the facade above the canopy. Again, it's not really blue, it just looks that way. At night, when the light of the sun has completely left the sky, the upper part of the facade will be black, perhaps punctuated by a few lit windows. 

I can work with the blackness of night. Here's a shot of the holiday decorations at Longwood Gardens.

Note that, in this picture, virtually all of the background details have dropped out. You can just barely make out a few figures walking on the path by the trees. They're being lit by the lights on the trees.

Talk about abstract art. The trees have been abstracted from their environment.

To Balance or Not to Balance

Also on the south side of the square is this building. Years ago I photographed Ted Kennedy coming out of a fundraiser here. There are a lot of different lights in this picture, but they are all balanced - it's almost balletic - and the overall result is, to my eye at least, very pleasing.

Across the square on the north side, we have this. Note the very bright lights on each side of the doors. They're trying too hard, and the result is an unbalanced lighting scheme.

Attack of the killer photons.

Let's now go across Walnut street and into the park. Recently the park's complement of street lamps got some new bulbs. They are the reason I'm writing this story.

Have a look at this picture of the center of the square. Those are very bright streetlights.

Help! I'm melting ... I'm melting.

Then look at the snowflakes in the trees. The snowflakes and the lamps are fighting one another, and the snowflakes are losing.

As I said earlier, these new lights are too white and too bright. I had been struggling to articulate exactly why I had such a visceral dislike for them, and then I read Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate (English translation 1985). It's a sprawling novel centered on the Battle of Stalingrad during World War II. Here's part of a description of the morning routine at a Soviet labor camp:

"The prisoners were woken by the orderlies at five in the morning. It was still pitch dark; the barrack-huts were lit by the merciless light that is common to prisons, railway stations and the waiting-rooms of city hospitals." (P. 174.)

Merciless light. I like that.

I don't think I'm alone in my concerns about this new, intense illumination. One evening recently, I was leaving the park, a short time after the lights came on, and I passed two women who were entering the park. One turned to the other and said, "Who wrote this lighting plan?"

Here is my surmise: Highway engineers wrote this lighting plan, and they did what they were trained to do.

All the Park's a Stage - or Many Stages

I hope we can all agree that this park is not a highway. I would like to go one step further. I suggest we look at it as a kind of theater - an open-air theatrical venue with a circulating audience and many stages of various sizes. This was clearly the intent of Paul P. Cret, the architect who, before World War I, produced the basic design we see today.

I frankly know very little about lighting design for the stage, so I went to the Free Library and checked out a book - J. Michael Gillette's Theatrical Design and Production (1987). Here's what he has to say about the purpose of theatrical lighting: 

"Obviously, there is something more to stage lighting than simply bathing the stage with light. Effective stage lighting not only lets the spectators see the action of the play but also ties together all the visual elements of the production and helps create an appropriate mood and atmosphere that heighten the audience's understanding and enjoyment of the play." (P. 263.) 

And here are four basic tasks for theatrical lighting, which I have adapted from pages 264-265 of Professor Gillette's book.

Illuminate the stage. The audience needs to see the action on the stage.

Highlights. The most important elements, such as the prima ballerina or the prima donna, should receive extra light. And God help you if you don't have a spotlight on the diva's face at all times.

Modeling. Figures need to appear three dimensional, and faces shouldn't look scary unless it's Halloween.

Mood. Lighting, and particularly color, are powerful generators of mood.

So how are we doing in the square? Let's have a look. Here's a view to the southwest down the main walkway, with a person striding purposefully in our direction.

Even though we're still in the blue hour (note the sky in the background), the wooden benches on the right are highlights threatening to blow out, and the shrubbery on the left is a murky, almost featureless blob. The walkway and the person in the middle of it are bathed in contrasty light that feels chillingly cold.

What young couple would want to pause for a romantic kiss in light like this?

Highlight the Sculpture

Let's have a look at how we're treating the stars of the show out here. They would be the park's sculptures, of which I'm counting five. There's the Duck Girl in the reflecting pool - I think of her as our prima ballerina. And then there are M. Barye's Lion, Billy the Goat, the Giant Frog, and the Sundial. (I'm leaving out a few smaller pieces. For more, click here.) 

These five sculptures all work beautifully in the sunlight. I feel badly for them after sunset. They all basically disappear. Have a look at the Duck Girl. She's a dark blob out in the reflecting pool, and you certainly can't see her face.

I did notice a little something in the drained reflecting pool, directly in front of the Duck Girl. I think this may be a light, but I'm not sure because I don't recall ever seeing it lit.

You may have noticed, in the wide shot of the fountain and the reflecting pool above, that the right side of the fountain wall is brighter than the left side. A few days later I had a closer look and discovered this.

The reason for the light differential is that the easternmost of the three bulbs jury-rigged in here is not functioning. (A few days after I took this shot, I went back, and the bulbs had been removed.)

The only sculpture that is currently lit is Barye's Lion.  I'll be gentle and say the lighting here has been inadequate for a long time, and the situation has only gotten worse with the arrival of the new bulbs in the street lamps. 

The other three sculptures are the goat, the frog, and the sundial. They all lack dedicated illumination.

The Guardhouse

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the guardhouse in the center of the square. It is a lovely structure, beautifully lit, and I think it bears up reasonably well under the new lights. But it looks better when the streetlights are turned off.

Rescue the Blue Hour

So, beyond the sculpture, how do we fix the overall lighting scheme in Rittenhouse Square? Let's start our planning with the blue hour.

I think a lot of city dwellers are blissfully unaware that the blue hour exists. That's partly because we hardly ever get its full effect in the city - the artificial lights are too bright. Instead of trying to drown the blue hour in photons, I suggest we celebrate it. 

Time is a dimension. The gates of night lie in the blue, but we don't need to rush through them. Let's see how the lights can help us with that. Right now, they don't actually all come on at once. They seem to go on by segments - a line here, a group there. But they all go on within about ten minutes of sundown.

Let's organize this process around something other than the demands of electrical circuitry, increasing the light gradually as the need for illumination increases. We might even want to put all these lights on dimmer switches, so a lamp could start softly and gradually get brighter. 

That way we'd be able to see more of the blue hour, instead of essentially shutting it down shortly after it starts.

Soften the Night

Leaves eat light. Grass eats light. It's what Mother Nature designed them to do. If you want to replicate daylight in the nighttime park, you need to cut down the trees and pave the lawns. Then you will have a facsimile of a parking lot in a suburban shopping mall. I suggest we instead aim to get our nightlights to work with the park instead of fighting it.

The point here is to put the light where it's needed to achieve your goals - which I think should be illumination, highlights, modeling, and mood. Instead of wasting electricity to feed trees from lamps on high poles, put the lights where they're needed, which is generally close to the ground.

You want people to see the pathways they're walking on, so they don't trip and fall. Put low lights on short poles - knee-high or waist-high - along the edge of the walk. 

You're worried about women being dragged off into the bushes? Light the bushes. There's no place to hide on Addison street at night. To quote Ernest Hemingway, a clean, well-lighted place. 

And yes, the very bright, merciless light that we're getting more and more of in this town actually makes the shadows look darker to the human eye. 

You want a soft, romantic mood? Kill the NASA-spec lights. They're useful on a launch pad at night, but we don't need them here. 

Will Rittenhouse Square ever look like Longwood Gardens, or even Addison street? I doubt it. But there are many opportunities for improving the light in Rittenhouse Square. It would help to start with a lighting plan that makes sense.

(The Chestnut Hill Local has been doing a good job covering the new streetlights in its area. For three stories and a letter to the editor, click here, here, here, and here.)

See also Paul P. Cret and Rittenhouse Square, Night Lights at Coney Island, City of Lights.