LIGHTING ACADEMY

BY MARCO LUDWIG

A light that echoes. That is what we are seeking.

Alexander von Salzmann, 1912

The countless modern de-

clinations of lighting as an
expression of design draw
attention away from the fact
that they actually come from a
single source. For example, the
study of architectural light has
its roots in theatrical lighting. It
is a study that has been a
genre of its own since Thomas
Edison’s invention of the in-
candescent lamp in 1879.
Theatrical lighting is linked to
outstanding figures who worked
at the end of the XIX and
THE PALAIS DE L’ELECTRICITÉ beginning of the XX centuries
and contributed to defining the
relationships between light and space in an innovative key.
The 1900 international exposition in Paris was the stage par excellence for the era’s technical
discoveries. At the same time – and this is of primary importance for our considerations – it was
the faithful representation of the esthetic canons of fin de siècle architecture.
The hordes of visitors were mainly interested in admiring the progress of technology. Two buildings
dominated the exposition. One was the monumental domed portico of Place de la Concorde that
served as the main entrance to the exhibition. At night the Palais de l’Electricité aroused even
greater amazement. Even the building’s name evoked both the contents displayed and the
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“container” in the sense of an architectural “object.” that was also on display. And thus, on the one
hand inside were all those products that could not have been developed without electricity such as
the dynamo, the escalator, the railroad and the various forms of expression of electric light that had
just celebrated its twentieth birthday. On the other was the outdoor mise en scène, an
extraordinary, innovative union of architecture and light. The statements of a famous art – and
cultural – critic of the day, Julius Meier-Graefe, allow us to understand how that union was
perceived: “…today, as we walk through the exposition at night we can see ourselves in the future.
The little angels and little corbels become pale, all these ornamental touches become specters in
the darkness; what remains is the huge profile, the monstrous mass […]. On its own the night
accomplishes what we expect from the new architecture: concentration, grandeur […]. A new world
shines during the nights of celebration […] and we observe dumbstruck as if under a spell. It is a
world we dare not approach for fear that it is all an illusion and that the image of the day will
reappear. All the buildings are transformed into supports for light.” Proud yet humble in other words
was the enthusiasm for an architecture which, at least at night, shed its decorative frivolities and
saccharin details to show itself to the visitor as a splendid luminous body. And the visitor,
inevitably, was seduced.
The buildings at the Exposition
Universelle – and hence also
René Binet’s 45 meter high
entrance – were not illuminated
from the outside. The facades
were covered with thousands of
colored light bulbs that created
emitted light by themselves.
This “auto-illumination” made
the Palais de l’Electricité even
more elegant since all the lights
could be switched on from a
single, central control panel with
rhythmic effects and alternating
plays of color that were
absolutely astonishing for the
THE ENTRANCE OF THE PARIS EXPO
time.
In spite of the “wedding cake” architecture style in fashion at the time – that was how contemporary
critics described it – thanks to artificial lighting the Palais de l’Electricité was “cleaned up” to remain
an outstanding example of early twentieth century architecture. Even today it seems like an
enchanted castle, illuminated from the inside towards the outside, whose lavishly furnished rooms
and hallways never lead the visitor to the building’s technical core. In other words, even if at night
electrical lighting melted this “gigantic meringue” to use another of Meier-Graefe’s delightful
expressions, it still maintained the features of the turn-of-the-century architecture with all its frills
and decorative excesses.
So, there is nothing strange about the fact that the French critic Babin described the nocturnal
image of the portico as a “dark blue velvety gleam which bursts into purple sparks and emerald fire
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at the top.” And that the flowing gradations of softened colors of the Palais de l’Electricité, its light
somewhere between Bengal lights and magical sparkle find their counterpart in the féerie, the
[theater] show based on the phantasmagoria of effects as opposed to prosaic light that renders
some architectural aspects – that is, the technical structure – visible. These fairy lights created
atmosphere, they did not reveal but rather created illusions and finally compensated for the
disenchantment that advancing industrialization demanded. The “electric fairy” had to flee from the
industrial buildings with their naked lights, and take refuge in the “buildings of whipped cream and
hazelnuts” (Louis Hautecoeur).
Féerie, “electric fairy” is not just the definition of how light was considered then and how, in reality
the still young phenomenon of electricity concealed the purely technical aspect. At the same time it
reveals that at that time electricity was naturally associated with femininity, elegance and sinuosity
as with purity and even divinity. In this concept as much as it may seem anachronistic today, we
find many elements of the
modern conception of light.
Around 1900, the American
artist of motion, Loie Fuller, a
cult figure who straddled the
two centuries, embodied this
idea of light. She came into
the light from the darkness of
the stage, not as a corporeal
being, but rather a luminous
female figure: “The apparition
unfolds from the darkest
night… Gives life to the beam
of electric light… a call to life…
the ballerina”. (Robert Marx).
Marx dared another ima-
ginative comparison that we
have already seen in relation
THE ARTIST OF MOTION LOIE FULLER to the light of the two symbol-
buildings of the Paris ex-
position: “It slowly gleams, filled with light like a diamond, to then become a sequence of colors
similar to gemstones”.
The setting for an opera produced in London in 1900 was entirely different from the fantastic
esthetics and focus on decoration that was exalted at the Paris Expo. The English producer,
director, set, décor and costume designer Edward Gordon Craig produced Henry Purcell’s Dido
and Aeneas and developed revolutionary, pioneering concepts of space and light that were later
adopted outside the world of theater.
Up to then, spatial effects on stage had been created with painted, conventional scenery, that
bounded the wings and hid them from the audience. The detail-rich flats and stage equipment
belong to an ideal that created the illusion of presumed realism. Craig made a definite break with
all this. He emptied the stage, he eliminated all the clutter except for a few items that he kept, in
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 abstract form, as they were necessary for his
productions. He proposed a new, bold language of
light with a fundamental role. In fact, it was light that
related the action and told the story. Just as the flats
disappeared from the stage and were relegated to the
darkness of the storage rooms, the light design could
abandon the service role it had played up to then.
Light became an autonomous element, one of the
leading actors among the characters in “the play.”
Edward Gordon Craig called the unity of these
narrative tools scene and no longer stage or scenery.
He introduced light as an intangible, “light as a
feather” artistic medium to replace heavy and merely
illustrative material “flats”; its mass unfolded in the
expressive power of light that creates space in a
sublime manner.
Furthermore, with the play of light, Craig the director
acquired the perspective that occurs in nature for the
stage. Light is not static: on the basis of this new
space-light concept, applied for the time being only to
the theater, the trait d’union between light and music
THE LIBRETTO OF DIDO & AENEAS, SET DESIGN came into being the way Craig outlined it later and that
BY GORDON CRAIG would traverse the history of XX century culture. “It
[the light] moves through the scene. It never stays in one place. By moving it becomes music.” This
development began with Richard Wagner’s atmosphere-filled compositions. In his theatrical
transpositions, however, he still worked with gaslight that illuminated the traditional canvas
backdrops with a restrained power, to create an illusion filled with atmosphere and suited to
Wagner’s voluptuous music.
We do not know to what extent what we have said up
to now can support the thesis that considers Edward
Gordon Craig the inventor of a new lighting concept if
not lighting design itself. It is certainly true that Craig
was the first to combine his own concept of stage and
scene with the purist quality of electric light. Craig was
the first to move in this direction in practical terms.
Some technical considerations had been put forward
just a few years earlier. We will quote mainly Adolphe
Appia, in his book La mise en scène du drame
Wagnérien and the later, expanded German version
Die Musik und die Inszenierung (1899) we find the
very eloquent concept of “figurative light.” Appia
distinguishes it from luminosity since the meaning is
A FORTUNY LAMP
exactly “figurative light” while luminosity represents
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the foundations of what we today call designer lighting. The definition that Adolphe Appia gives of
light as a “victorious expressive force” goes beyond the value of the role lighting design played in
Craig’s stage sets. Light is not just one of many representational tools: it is the most important. His
credo was: “Light is for the performance as what music is to the score: it is the expressive element
as opposed to the sign or mark, oriented towards allusion.”
After the 1900 Exposition Universelle and still in Paris, the development of the figurative application
of electric light received another important thrust in 1903. The occasion was again an opera for
which Adolphe Appia designed the sets. It was Mariano Fortuny, the lighting director of that
performance, who definitively moved traditional lighting towards the modern, XX century study of
light. It is to him that we owe the discovery of indirect lighting: light produced by arc lamps (the
brightest at the time, even though they
were not adjustable) that Fortuny aimed at
semi-spherical horizons or sometimes
made in his own workshop. In contact with
these surfaces the light “broke up” and was
reflected in space and spread throughout
the stage “filling” it evenly as if it were a
material. If we look at the artistic history of
light up to today, we realize that James
Turrell’s light-space systems originated
precisely back there.
Seen in retrospective, the innovation is
even more obvious: Mariano Fortuny
carried on Edward Gordon Craig’s con-
ceptual approach to light in a coherent
manner. Craig moved back the spotlights
focused on the upstage flats so they were
no longer fixed lighting instruments for the
backdrop, to create the spatial illusion, so
that the light they reflected came back onto
the stage to create the action. For Craig
this position was the bridge of invisible
lighting with the audience: from this bridge
“the lights looked down” on what was
happening on the stage. Similarly Fortuny A SET BY GORDON CRAIG: THE ACTRICE IS HIS MOTHER
forced the auto-representation of light so
that it flutters freely on the stage and in the atmosphere, and the scenic elements play around it.
Fortuny went further and enriched his stage lights with color. Two strips of fabric moved by two
cylindrical rollers – one was red-yellow-blue, the other black-white – made it possible to change
and control the colors and luminosity of the space manually. Thanks to this discovery, the study of
light made a great leap forward, picking up on the concept that Adolphe Appia had already
developed in some way at the end of the XIX century, that is that “color is no longer merely linked

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 to the surfaces of vertical canvases, but can freely
enter space and expand; it is so intimately linked to
light that it is difficult to separate the two” (Adolphe
Appia).
All these impulses towards light design that were
unusual up to then, based on the idea that light, music
and motion must work together on stage as a single
unit, were applied in 1912 in the Hellerau theater near
Dresden. The theater, built to designs by Heinrich
Tessenow is 45 meters long, 16 wide and 112 high and
has neither a clearly defined stage nor a section
specifically for the audience: the two are on the same
level.The open stage “breathed” - we can say that it
practically was alive - thanks to the lighting system
created by Adolphe Appia in cooperation with the
founder of eurhythmics, Emile Jacques-Dalcroze. The
stationary system consisted of several thousand
THE HELLERAU THEATRE
incandescent lamps, some were colored, and
spotlights, all controlled from a central panel located behind cloth covered lateral or ceiling “walls”
and hidden from the audience’s view.
In this way the interior architectural components were transformed into self-illuminating surfaces.
And that was the true innovation of the Hellerau theater. Such self-luminescence, to put it in
modern words, in place of traditional lighting could be seen – albeit in embryonic form – in the
Palais de l’Electricité at the Paris Expo in 1900. But the Hellerau theater, with its very simple
architecture, seems to be built entirely of light and it was the first in the history of architectural
lighting to apply this principle. And it was only 1912.