Turned on

Streetscapes by spotlight

by Douglass Shand-Tucci

SKYLINE

Architecture by night was the last thing on my mind as I made my daily climb (nine floors up!) to my perch at the old Boston Athenaeum, in whose long, graceful, barrel-vaulted top floor I do most of my writing.

Musing, rifling through my folder, filling my writing pad with this idea and that, I found myself looking up, as is my habit when an idea or a word won't come. The portion of the skyline that I see from my alcove arcs along Boylston and Tremont Streets from the Steinert Building on Piano Row to the Park Street Church, the steeple of which rises hopefully before me -- elegant foreground to majestic background.

Eventually, an idea always comes. So too does that moment -- so wonderful for anyone alert to the world of the senses, and the axis of the aesthetic and the erotic on which they spin -- >when the upward glance meets the descending twilight. (Happens so early these bleak March days.) Soon enough, lights are winking on all along the skyline, while the sound of bells from the church (now, too, a blaze of light) signals the hour to head home.

That's when it occurred to me how much more striking the church's fine early-19th-century steeple is by night, when its lighting brings out its detail more sharply than by day, imparting to the overall design a new delicacy.

The use of electricity in Boston architecture goes back to the early 1900s, when the fashion was mostly for the sort of colorful electrical display built into the new Custom House Tower in 1912 -- four huge clock faces backlit by incandescent bulbs (yellow for the numbers, blue for the minute markers). The alternately blue or red weather beacon that surmounts the old Hancock Tower of 1948 is a later example.

But full-fledged illumination of an entire building, or of an important feature like a façade or a spire, was unusual. Probably the earliest example in Boston, shown in a 1901 painting by James Weston on display at the old State House, was the illumination of the State House dome that year. It was likely done to mark the New Year's Eve ceremonies at the Massachusetts capitol, where the first year of the 20th century was ushered in by massed trumpets and public prayer.

Today, this sort of lighting is still unusual. Only a few structures beyond Boston's core are illuminated, including the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, the First Church in Dorchester (both of which you can see from the Red Line), and the West Newton Unitarian Church (visible from the turnpike). But I experience many of the great in-town landmarks "lit up" every night during my walk home from the Athenaeum to Copley Square.

It's only a few steps from the Athenaeum's front door to the State House itself. Its lighting design today -- because it focuses on the splendid 18th-century central section by Charles Bulfinch, obscuring the much more prosaic 20th-century wings -- re-creates something of the effect of how the State House appeared 200 years ago. This is all the more the case because the gold of the dome (a Victorian addition) is not much emphasized by night; instead, the flat, attenuated, white-painted wood trim is brought out so as to make the Bulfinch front as graphic and scintillating as a Wedgwood relief.

Across the street, the lighting of the Colonel Robert Gould Shaw Memorial is a marvelous foil. At the Shaw all is dark bronze in profound relief, the deeply shadowed modeling of which has been beautifully accented by the lighting designer, Chris Ripman. It is almost as if Shaw and his men, marching still, are seen by the gas lamps long gone from this part of Beacon Street.

After one plunges down into Boston Common, there is for a long time only disappointment. The towering column of the Civil War Memorial overlooking the Frog Pond is supposed to be lit, but you could have fooled me. Nor is the Public Garden much better, though Henry Lee, the indefatigable leader of the Friends of the Garden, has high hopes, especially for the four statues on the Boylston Street Mall opposite the Four Seasons.

The great exception is the lighting of the truly magnificent figure of George Washington: so solitary seeming, astride his horse, his face in shadow and his profile the bolder for it. And one may well continue up the Commonwealth Avenue Mall toward which the first president is pointed. The effect is arresting: one historical figure after another emerges, illuminated, out of the darkness, and is gone soon enough when passed by.

What T.S. Eliot said of street lamps is here true of Boston statues: one walks, so to speak, "the spaces of the dark." Which is also to make the point that darkness, with its hiddenness, is as much a player in my nightly walk home as is illumination.

But not so in Copley Square, where the peregrination cannot help but turn festive, triumphant even: here is architecture of world importance lit with great flair and imagination, and with an evident artistic unity full of marvelous contrasts and subtleties.

Why? Because, by some happy accident, everyone in the square has had recourse to the same lighting designer, William Lam -- a pioneering American designer (an MIT graduate in architecture and the author of several books on lighting) whose other Boston credits include the Custom House and the old City Hall.

Trinity Church Lam has lit in a way that is at once spiritual and mysterious -- as befits its robust and muscular volumes, so picturesquely composed. Because the overall structure is not washed with strong light -- only its recesses -- the effect for me is of a holy mountain, a mountain almost entirely in shadow, the depths and recesses of which (seen through H.H. Richardson's tremendous arches) glow rather as lanterns glow in deep darkness. Lighting as mystical experience.

The Copley Plaza, on the other hand, Grand Dame of Boston's Edwardian palace-hotels, is endowed with dramatic upward shafts of lights along the façade, suggestive of klieg lights and thus of the Copley's glamorous history.

Then, facing Trinity, the Boston Public Library -- perhaps America's greatest public building of its era -- Lam has bathed in a wonderfully refined and icy gray-blue wash of uniform luminosity, using a wide beam horizontally but a very shallow one vertically -- a beam that works with other lights (some hidden in the finials of the street lights) to deliver a more intense glow on the tablets of names at the base of the great arched windows of the façade and on the topmost cornice.

Finally, the multicolored stone tower of the Old South Church -- lit, like Trinity, rather picturesquely -- achieves an appropriately more exotic character: every flowering green-copper cusp of its elegant pinnacled top fairly dances with light against the night sky. The effect is magical.

Although Copley Square is unrivaled in the quality of its architecture and lighting design alike, there is a worthy afterword just up Huntington Avenue at I.M. Pei's Christian Science Center, where the effect of the illuminated domed church seen across Pei's block-long reflecting pool makes for a wonderfully serene walk on summer nights.

But not every night. Most evenings, for my taste, there is a much more exotic afterword on nearby Newbury Street, in some ways a rival to Copley itself -- and worth a longer walk home.

The Tower Records building is the only realized work in Boston by Frank Gehry, and it will remain so until his forthcoming MIT Science Center. And Gehry is the by-no-means-implausible candidate for World's Greatest Architect since the death of Frank Lloyd Wright. It is, of course, like all such distinctions, a ludicrous one. But in the wake of Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilboa, Spain, which burst upon an astonished and dazzled world last year with a force felt even in Boston, I'm not going to quarrel with it -- not this year, anyway.

Certainly not standing across the street from Tower. Although it is a marvelous building by day or night, it is unique in Boston in being, as I see it, better by night -- a reflection, surely, of the fact that nighttime illumination of the entire building was conceived as an integral part of the architect's design from the start. This fact is attested to by Robert Silver, the principal of Schwartz/Silver who worked most closely with Gehry on the Tower building.

It is like a Mediterranean sunset -- when, that is, all the lights are working. The bulk of the building is washed in an almost dreamlike light -- gorgeous, soft, and rosy. Meanwhile, the angular steel-strut top floor is highlighted with green-blue lighting that creates a dramatic contrast. In the best sense of a much overworked word, it is very romantic. And the dream is surely worth the detour.

In winter, however, I content myself after Copley Square with the view of the Old South Church tower from my own apartment's bay window (my other perch), where I usually finish my day's writing after dinner.

Then, around midnight, another glance upward, in search of another word -- this time it is Old South's tower that is again in view, and the news is of lights turned not on, but off. And there is the day's end, and the night's, too.

At first it is disappointing. All the life seems to have gone out of the tower. Architecture illuminated at night focuses our attention so much more sharply; it seems, in turn, so much more brilliant, heightening the senses in a curiously erotic way. It is, after all, so much more theatrical.

But the darkened tower speaks too.

Historian and critic Douglass Shand-Tucci is the author of several books on American art and architecture and New England studies. His column appears biweekly in the Phoenix.