Back4.20052E
Jour Noir
TOWARDS THE DIAMBULISM
Project for Outdoor Gallery of the City of Gdansk
Gdansk, Poland, project 2005 / built 2006
Philippe Rahm architects
Collaborators: Cyrille Berger, Alexandra Cammas, Irene D'Agostino
Client: City of Gdansk
The introduction of the street lighting in the city during the 19-century was at the origin of one the most important social and political revolution of the urban practice and of the form of the city. The ambition was demiurgic: to make the day during the night. The street lighting caused new urban typologies (the boulevard for example) but was also the cause of new behaviors, those of the noctambulism, sauntering the evening on the boulevards, dancing in the balls. It is an ambition of the same order that we want to produce today but more contemporary, more ambiguous: that to create the night during the day.
Our project is that to invent a negative urban standard lamp, producing the night during the day, physically. It's a perverted answer to the perpetual day created by the modernity, Internet and the contemporary globalization. After the “Nuit blanche” (“white night” in French means All-nighter) we would like to invent the “Jour noir”, the Black day (All-Dayer). After the noctambulism we would like to propose the diambulism.
To create, in the streets, the night during the day, we work on the emitted electromagnetic radiation, as the traditional outdoor lamp. If the traditional outdoor lighting, like a mini-sun, emits a visible radiation of light (artificial electromagnetic radiations of the sunlight), our outdoor lamp emits an invisible and cold electromagnetic radiation, like that emitted by the night sky. Our lighting consists of a diffuser like a mini night celestial vault, cooled by the flow of glycolic water at the temperature close to 0°C. Its surface is black, absorbing the whole of the luminous spectrum. As it is the case the night with the icy night vault of heaven, our body, with 37°C, will lose energy by infrared radiation in direction of this cold vault. It will cool by thermal phenomenon of balance. A hot body always loses heat to the profit of a cold body. Our outdoor lamps will produce the night thus a black and cold light like the electromagnetic spectrum of the night sky vault.
The installation that we propose in the streets of Szopy and Kamienna is a prototype of a new type of urban outdoor lamp to invent the diambulsm. It is associated with other outdoor furniture, an urban bed, for sleeping during the day in the streets of the city. At the head of the bed, two loudspeakers diffuse some “Nocturnes for piano” of the famous polish musician Frederic Chopin but also from others composers, contemporary musician, Debussy, Glinka and John Field, the inventor of this form of music for the night a the beginning of the 19-century.
6 standard lamps for nightlight lighting will be installed on the streets. They reproduce the electromagnetic spectrum of the night on the length of the street. It will function only during the day, more strongly at midday, like a inversion of the night and the day. The lamp is made with radiators tubes, curved to create like a sink black vault. Inside the tube, glycolic water at 0° runs. A cold machine generates the cold water. The machine will be installed under the bridge.
The nightlight standard lamps are installed in the street, in the prolongation of the existing standard lamps. The system of lighting is incomplete in the street. Our project will complete but also distorts the system and alignment of the traditional street lighting.