Light pollution hides views of the cosmos and causes a host of environmental problems. But architectural and landscape lighting can be designed so that it is sensitive to the night sky and ecosystems yet still responds to clients’ requirements.
When the Calgary Municipal Land Corporation tapped Civitas and W Architecture & Landscape Architecture to create a nature-based park on a 31-acre island in the city’s Bow River, the landscape architects called upon Tillett Lighting Design to provide contextual illumination with the delicate touch for which the firm is known.
“The idea was to create a ribbon in the middle of the canyon,” says Hervé Descottes, principal of L’Observatoire International, about the High Line project.
After the London 2012 Summer Olympics, lighting design firms Speirs + Major and Michael Grubb Studio worked with landscape architect James Corner Field Operations to transform what had been an open concourse in the Olympic Park into a 1,600-foot-long promenade.
Located in a previously industrial part of Paris, the 1975 Pont de Sèvres Towers, designed by Badani and Roux-Dorlut, have been reimagined by French architect Dominique Perrault. Renamed Citylights, the once detached office complex now embraces the city with sustainable prism-shaped buildings that illuminate the rapidly developing district (dubbed Trapèze) with a gentle luminosity.
A two- to three-hour drive from the bright lights of Southern California’s largest cities, Borrego Springs—a small town bordering the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in northern San Diego County—became the world’s second official Dark-Sky Community in 2009.
