For centuries, architectural theory, discourse and agency have been based on daylight and solar paradigms. References to the night in Vitruvius' De architectura (30-15 BC), widely considered the founding text of Western architectural theory, are residual and they are similarly scarce in the most influential Renaissance treatises, such as Leon Battista Alberti's De re aedificatoria (1452) and Andrea Palladio's I quattro libri dell'architettura (1570). Likewise, seminal writings on modern architecture rarely refer to night-time environments, which can be evaluated both textually and photographically. In this sense, Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock's The International Style (1932), the book resulting from the MoMA exhibition that introduced modernism to America, illustrates a clear preference for daytime pictures¹, noting that "the photographs and the plans were for the most part provided by the architects themselves²."

In the second half of the 20th century, authors such as Reyner Banham, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Rem Koolhaas went some way to correct the invisibility of the night in architectural theory with influential books such as The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (1969), Learning from Las Vegas (1972) and Delirious New York (1978), which partially examine the role of technology and night in the construction of modern domesticity and leisure culture in Western architecture. In recent decades, significant contributions include John A. Jakle's book City Lights (2001), Dietrich Neumann's Architecture of the Night (2003), Edward Dimendberg's Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (2004) and Jonathan Crary's 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013). In the latter, Crary explores how sleep, through its very existence and progressive reduction in recent decades, has become the last remaining bastion of resistance to the increasing monetisation of human activity in market economies. In the same line, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings openly declared in 2017 that "We are competing with sleep, on the margin, it's a very large pool of time³," envisioning human biology as the biggest challenger to his company's market.

These references typify the extent to which the identity of contemporary human beings and their domestic, professional and cultural spaces are inseparable from the night. Nevertheless, as of today, influential contemporary architecture magazines such as El Croquis, Apartamento, or A+U, still feature more than 90 per cent daytime photography. Accompanying essays rarely refer to night spaces, not to mention night-time activities or related behaviours. Of all the architecture biennales celebrated worldwide since the Venice Architecture Biennale was inaugurated in 1980, none has been entirely dedicated to the night. From the dominance of daytime photography in publications to the absence of dedicated nocturnal events, architectural media has, albeit with a few exceptions, uncritically inherited the pre-modern diurnal episteme that preceded the invention of artificial light. Ultimately, is architectural representation diurnal by default?⁴

For us at the Department of Interior Architecture at HEAD-Genève, Switzerland, this question became an important source of fascination. It was this fascination that prompted the Scènes de Nuit project, originally a bachelor-level studio 5 at the Department, from which an exhibition and series of events at the Forum des Architectures (f'ar) in Lau- sanne, developed in May 2019. In 2020, Scènes de Nuit was launched as an official research project funded by the HES-SO, University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Western Switzerland. The Department associated a team to the project that included Javier Fernández Contreras, Youri Kravtchenko, Manon Portera, Roberto Zancan and Vera Sacchetti and several different activities were organised around the theme.

The origin of this publication lies in the international symposium "Nocturnal History of Architecture," which took place at HEAD - Genève on December 6-7, 2021⁵. The symposium advanced the hypothesis that such a history of architecture is yet to be made and proposed a first attempt at this effort. The two days of the event were enriched by the investigation of different historical contexts, geographies and media, from classical Greece to modern Europe and from ancient Japan to the spaces of MTV. The contributions looked beyond the traditional Western centres of historiography, bringing to the fore other cultural outlooks or hidden and traditionally ignored realities.

This first attempt at a Nocturnal History of Architecture presented in the book takes readers back to ancient times and ends in our contemporary moment. Organised chronologically, it starts with a philosophical introduction to the epistemology of darkness in the history of the built environment by Sébastien Grosset. Taking us to Greece, Efrosyni Boutsikas focuses on the nocturnal power of ancient Greek architecture, with an emphasis on religious architecture and Maria Shevelkina’s exploration of the subterranean night as a productive space in sacred Byzantine architecture.

Murielle Hladik immerses us in a study of the presence of the moon as an essential element in Japanese aesthetics and architecture. Back in Europe, in the baroque period of 17th century Rorne, Maarten Delbeke chases darkness and night as the performance of metaphor. Across the Atlantic, Amy Chazkel questions the conditions of urban slavery and sleep in the 19th century Brazil. In contrast, Lucía Jalón Oyarzun casts light on the Underground Railroad and its connections with clandestinity and night-faring practices in the United States and Canada. In the 20th century, Carlotta Darò and Yann Rocher took a closer look at the typology of atmospheric cinemas and how they have contributed to the artificialisation of the sky. Looking at communist Poland, Aleksandra Sumorok analyses artificial light in the interiors of Socialist Realism, observing the careful determination of the emotions they should provoke. On a contrasting position, Chase Galis reflects upon the resistance to electrification in certain rural areas of Switzerland. Conversely, Catharine Rossi studies the technological innovations in the nightclub architecture of Italian designers in the second half of the 20th century.

Back in the United States, Léa-Catherine Szacka investigates the birth of MTV and how it brought clubbing to the basements of American suburbia. Back in Europe, within the industrial coal-mining landscapes of the German Ruhr area, Hilary Orange explores the night vision of the IBA Emscher Park and Nick Dunn envisions the creation of nocturnal spaces that are convivial, inclusive and sustainable in contemporary Manchester. Finally, Youri Kravtchenko contributes a postscript on the design studio Scènes de Nuit that he has led at HEAD-Genève since 2018, working on practice-based research with students in Interior Architecture to test these hypotheses in nocturnal projects and exhibitions that have been presented in different venues and events like the Designers Saturdays 2018 in Langenthal, the Design Parade 2019 in Toulon, or indeed Alcova/ Milan Design Week 2021 with the iconic Milk Bar project co-curated by India Mahdavi.

From its perspective, this book proposes a beginning, an endeavour to be continued by other scholars, designers and colleagues. Its authors are aware that absences are more numerous than presences and that many topics have not been dealt with within the limits of time and space allowed here. By analysing and studying "night scenes", this book hopes to show how the night has historically been a central laboratory for the development of new forms of thinking, architecture and, ultimately, of living.

The above presents an excerpt from ‘A Nocturnal History of Architecture’ edited by Javier Fernández Contreras, Roberto Zancan and Vera Sacchetti which was released on February 1, 2024. The book is one of the results of the research platform Scenes de Nuit and two symposiums organised by them.

References

^1.Only five out of 83 photographs depict spaces that are partially or fully artificially lit: Alvar Aalto's Turun Sanomat building, Uno Åhren's Flamman Soundfilm Theater, Marcel Breuer's Berlin apartment, Mies van der Rohe's apartment study in New York, and Jan Ruhtenberg's apartment living room in Berlin. See Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style (New York-London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1932/1995).
^2.Hitchcock and Johnson, The International Style, 9
^3.Aatif Sulleyman, "Netflix's biggest competition is sleep, says CEO Reed Hastingms," The Independent, April 19, 2017.
^4.The historical introduction in the first paragraphs of this essay is part of the research project Scènes de Nuit and was first presented in the publication: Scènes de Nuit. Night and Architecture, ed. Javier F. Contreras, Youri Kravtchenko and Manon Portera (Geneva: HEAD- Publishing / Madrid: Ediciones Asimétricas, 2021).
^5.Scientific Committee: Javier F. Contreras, Roberto Zancan, Vera Sacchetti, and Youri Kravtchenko. Lectures by: Efrosyni Boutsikas, Murielle Hladik, Maarten Delbeke, Lucía J. Oyarzun, Carlotta Darò, Yan Rocher, Alexandra Sumorok, Léa-Catherine Szacka, Hilary Orange, and Nick Dunn.