![]() ![]() The overall scheme will also change when the pandemic allows Villareal to come to London: it’s his usual practice, so far denied on this phase of the project by Covid, to tweak and tune his designs on site. Sometimes the colours on the bridges change fast, sometimes slowly, sometimes a whole bridge at a time, sometimes arch-by-arch. The white lights on the balustrades of the Golden Jubilee walkways, for example, pulse with horizontal rhythms, which complement the movements of trains behind them. These, he says, respond to the movement of the “living breathing thing” that is the river, and “mirror the activity around it” – the rise and fall of tides, people and vehicles on the bridges. There may be others, as the lights are always shifting, according to patterns set by Villareal. Photograph: Jason HawkesĪt least, these were the hues I saw during a temporary and preliminary switch-on last month. Illuminated River from Waterloo to Lambeth. Lambeth is meant to be red, like the seats in the House of Lords, but now also veers into purple. Westminster, according to an obscure yet not very old tradition, has to be green, like the seats in the House of Commons, so in Villareal’s scheme goes through a mint/pistachio/malachite/go-signal spectrum. The Golden Jubilee Bridges, which are a pair of walkways attached to either flank of Hungerford Railway Bridge, are mostly white. Their palettes, to be seen every evening from dusk to 2am, run some gamuts: Blackfriars is in a fuchsia-to-marigold range Waterloo has a fast-changing rainbow strip along each of its balustrades and sunset washes on its undersides. The five new ones are on the stretch that runs through the political and cultural centres of the capital, the bit most likely to say “London” to tourists and visitors, the most populated at night, running from St Paul’s Cathedral to the National Theatre and the Southbank Centre to the Houses of Parliament. A further five, upstream from Lambeth, are on hold for now, because the funders who might support them are facing unprecedented demands from Covid-hit cultural institutions. Five more, from Blackfriars to Lambeth, will light up later this month. But four of Illuminated River’s schemes, from London Bridge to the Millennium Bridge, were switched on in July 2019. The paradoxical invisibility of light in architectural discourse has allowed this £31m project to become reality, if not exactly easily, with comparatively little fuss: other large-scale visions – a “floating park” proposed in 2011, a certain garden bridge – have foundered on logistical and political complexities. The lights respond to the movement of the ‘living breathing thing’ that is the river, and ‘mirror the activity around it’ 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. Good lighting is also a fairly cheap way of improving the public realm, compared with creating buildings and parks and new squares. 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. 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. The planning system has little to say about it. Yet it is oddly neglected in discussions of architectural beauty, especially in its artificial versions. It also varies in tone, intensity, direction, contrast and colour, which means that the solid stuff that it illuminates changes with it. Which makes it somewhat fundamental to architecture: there wouldn’t be much point, without it, to architects troubling themselves with form and decoration. Light, rather obviously, is the thing that allows us to see shapes and colours. ![]()
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