Lichtdom (pronounced lish-dumm)
A visual technique using
light to emulate large-scale architecture.
1934: The construct of
the German Lichtdom was licht + dom (literally “cathedral of light”). Licht
(variously light, effortless, freely, easy, free; luminous; eye, clear, sparse,
bright, light, shiny, light colored; distinct,
plain, obvious, explicit, lucid,
straightforward) was from the Middle High German lieht and the Middle German līcht),
from the Old High German lioht, from the
Old Saxon lioht, from the Proto-West
Germanic leuht, from the Proto-Germanic
leuhtą, from the primitive Indo-European
lewktom. The descendants include the Dutch licht and the English light. The obsolete alternative spelling was Liecht.
The colloquial uses include describing candles and (in hunting), the eye
of (especially ground) game. The usual plural
is Lichter but Lichte operates as a plural when speaking of candles. Dom
(cathedral; church; big church building; dome, cupola) was from the French dôme, from the Italian duomo, from the Latin domus (ecclesiae (literally “house (of
the church)”)), a calque of the Ancient
Greek οἶκος τῆς ἐκκλησίας
(oîkos tês ekklēsías).
Of all that was designed by Albert Speer (1905-1981; Hitler’s court architect 1934-1942), little was built and less remains. Although he would later admit the monumentalism of the Nazi architectural plans was a mistake, his apologia was always tinged with the regret that in the years to come, all he was likely to be remembered for was his “immaterial lightshow”, used as a dramatic backdrop for the party rallies held at the Zeppelinfeld stadium in Nuremberg. Compared with what, had things worked out, he’d have been able to render in steel, concrete, marble and granite, Lichtdom (cathedral of light) was of course ephemeral but it’s undeniably memorable. Speer created the effect by placing the Luftwaffe’s (the German air force) entire stock (152) of 1500 mm (60 inch) searchlights around the stadium’s perimeter and maximized the exposure of the design by insisting as many events as possible be conducted in darkness, the other advantage being the lighting disguised the paunchiness of the assembled Nazis, many of whom were flabbier than the party’s lean, Nordic ideal, something which anyway was suspect, one joke spread by the famously cynical Berlin natives noting that empirically a better description of the Nazi ideal was "as blonde as Hitler, as fit as Göring, as tall as Goebbels and as sane as Hess".
Few were unimpressed. Sir Neville Henderson (1882-1942; UK ambassador to Germany 1937-1939), the UK’s admittedly impressionable ambassador described the ethereal atmosphere as “…both solemn and beautiful… like being in a cathedral of ice.” History though has preferred “cathedral of light” and brief views are captured in Hans Weidemann’s (1904-1975) Festliches Nürnberg (Festival of Nuremberg; a 1937 propaganda film chronicling the 1936 and 1937 events) which is mercifully shorter than Leni Riefenstahl’s (1902–2003) better-known works although the poor quality of the film stock used can only hint at the majesty achieved but the use of Richard Wagner's (1813-1883) Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868) as a musical accompaniment helps. Riefenstahl actually claimed she suggested the idea to Speer and a much better record exists in her film Olympia (1938) which documented the 1936 Summer Olympics at which the technique was also used. Architects had of course for millennia been interested in light but apart from those responsible for the placement of stained glass windows and other specialties, mostly they were concerned with function rather than anything representational. It was the advances the nineteenth century in the availability and luminosity of artificial light which allowed them to use light as an aesthetic element not limited by the time of day and thus the angle of the sun.
Speer had plenty of time to reflect on the past while serving the twenty years in Berlin’s Spandau prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity, a sentence he was lucky to receive. His interest in light persisted and with unrestricted access to the FRG’s (the Federal Republic of Germany, the old West Germany) technical libraries, he assembled close to a thousand pages of notes for a planned book on the history of the window in European buildings, musing on variables such as the cost and availability of glass at different times in different places, the shifting cost of the labor of glaziers & carpenters and market interventions such as England’s notorious “window tax” which resulted in some strange looking structures. Ever drawn to the mathematics he’d in his youth intended to study until forced to follow his father into architecture, he pondered the calculations which might produce the changes in “what value a square meter of light had at different periods” and what this might reveal beyond the actual buildings.
It was a shame the book was never written. He recalled also the effects he applied to the German pavilion he built for the Paris World’s Fair in 1937, bathing it at night with “…skilfully arranged spotlights. The result was to make the architecture of the building emerge sharply outlined against the night, and at the same time to make it unreal... a combination of architecture and light.” It was at the Paris event the German and Soviet pavilions sat directly opposed, something of a harbinger and deliberately so. He was nostalgic too about the Lichtdom, thinking it recalled “a fabulous setting, like one of the imaginary crystal palaces of the Middle Ages” although wryly he would note history would remember his contributions to his profession only for the ephemeral, the “…idea that the most successful architectural creation of my life is a chimera, an immaterial phenomenon.” Surprisingly, for someone who planned the great city of Germania (the planned re-building of Berlin) with its monumental structures, the news that all that remained in the city of his designs were a handful of lampposts (which stand to this day) seemed something almost amusing. In all his post-war writings, although there’s much rejection as “a failure” of the plan of Germania and the rest of the “neo-Classical on a grand scale” which characterized Adolf Hitler’s (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) vision of representational architecture, it’s not hard to detect twinges of regret for the unbuilt and sometimes he admitted it. As he was contemplating a return to the drawing board upon his impending release, he noted: “Although I have had enough of monumental architecture and turn my mind deliberately to utilitarian buildings, it sometimes comes hard for me to bid goodbye to my dreams of having a place in the history of architecture. How will I feel when I am asked to design a gymnasium, a relay station, or a department store after I planned the biggest domed hall in the world? Hitler once said to my wife: ‘I am assigning tasks to your husband such as have not been given for four thousand years. He will erect buildings for eternity!’ And now gyms!” As things transpired, not even a gym was built and he instead wrote his history in text. Of that piece of curated architecture, some were fooled and some not.
Dramatic though it was, the exact effect Speer achieved in the 1930s is so tainted by its association with the Nazis that few have attempted to recycle the motif although one pop-star used the effect as a visual backdrop in 1976 when he was going through a right-wing phase which he chose later not to mention. Isolated or clustered beams are however often used and one display is an annual “Tribute in Light” to commemorate the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It demonstrates the way the play of light can be used; depending on conditions, the light can bounce off the clouds, creating a very different effect than that afforded by a clear sky and it’s possible to render in those clouds a virtual oculus.
One problem with high intensity light the Tribute in Light has high-lighted is the way temporarily it messes each year with the migration of hundreds of thousands of songbirds. The memorial uses 88 focused spotlights, the beams of which reach some 6¼ miles (10 km) into the sky and are visible from as far away as sixty miles (100 km). Traditionally, the display was illuminated from dusk to dawn but of late it’s been switched off for twenty minute intervals in deference to the songbirds which in mid-September make their long flight from their breeding grounds in Canada's boreal forests to their winter homes in the southern US, Mexico, and Central & South America. They fly mostly by night and it’s thought they’ve evolved to navigate by the stars but, unfortunately, are much attracted to light. The Tribute in Light having more light than anything else at altitude, the display seems to confuse the birds and it was noted the death toll from birds crashing into New York windows increased every 9/11. Observers found there was also an element of sound involved, the birds in the light issuing the call associated with distress, this tending to draw more songbirds to the light.
Researchers used radar
to quantify the effect. Typically, the
skies within a ¼ mile
(400 m) of the un-illumined memorial contained around 500 birds but when lit,
within 20 minutes, there were almost 16,000.
Extrapolating the data, it was estimated some 1.1 million migrating songbirds
had been affected between 2008-2016, even accounting for the lights since 2009
having been shut-off for twenty minutes whenever volunteers count more than
1,000 birds in the beams. It’s thought
the death–toll from birds crashing into buildings is relatively low but there’s
concern also the creatures are compelled to expend energy when circling the
site, burning up vital energy needed for their long flights. Shutting off the lights is thought to allow
the birds to re-focus on their guiding stars to find their bearings and
continue the migration south. Bird
lovers would prefer searchlights not be used at all and some sites have agreed
not to use them during the migration season but there’s obviously much
sensitivity around the 9/11 commemoration.
Human development of the built environment has for a long time influenced
the migration path, the radar data confirming birds disproportionately choose
to fly over cities, the researchers referring to the “almost magnetic pull of
birds to light.” We need to remember
that it’s their planet too.
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