Abstract

Since its beginning, the art of external illumination has substantially influ-enced the creation and the perception of architecture and the night-time urban environment. In her lecture, the author examines and defines the significant interdisciplinary conditions related to architectural lighting design that have evolved over the years, starting from the first simple exterior lighting projects to the more modern, complex concepts of illumination. The first artistic experi-ments with the effects of lighting on ar-chitecture date back to the ancient times. However, the more mature intentions of lighting building facades for usability as well as aesthetic and artistic purposes appeared on a larger scale in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This went hand-in-hand with the inven-tion of the electric light bulb. The signifi-cant role in the search for new directions on how to illuminate buildings played a central role at various world exhibitions, the experiences of building form using light performed by architects of modern-ism era as well as experiments inspired from theatre, primarily driven by Stanley McCandless, Abe Feder and Richard Kelly. These experiments conducted mainly in the 1950s and 60s led to the birth of a new discipline called architectural lighting design. Since then many creative visions of architectural lighting started to appear in urban environments at night. When this concept of "painting with light" seemed to be reaching its peak, a number of limitations associated with architectural lighting design emerged. The energy crisis of the 1970s forced the need to reduce the costs of lighting and led to the abandonment of costly and unneces-sary elements such as exterior lighting. Later research in seemingly distant and unrelated disciplines to architectural lighting design such as biology, medicine, ecology and environmental protection has highlighted a number of conditions and restrictions which exterior lighting projects should take into considera-tion. Inappropriately designed exterior lighting in cities has been identified as one of the reasons for climate change and disorders in the integrity of ecosystems. Attempts to address these interdisci-plinary conditions in today's projects of external illumination are not an easy task.

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