55 cultural landmarks of Porto Alegre

Porto Alegre gathered 55 cultural landmarks of its historic centre into a single lighting plan rather than treating them as 55 separate commissions. The Mercado Público, in the photograph, is the most recognisable of the set.

That is the difference a plan makes. Prominence at night is won by contrast: of quantity of light, of colour, of movement. Any building can join that competition; when everything reaches for prominence at once, the result is a luminous cacophony in which nothing stands out. A monument should not have to compete for it, and that hierarchy is settled at the level of the set.

Nor is lighting heritage only a matter of making it visible. Conserving a landmark’s image does not mean returning it to its original state, which for most of these buildings was the darkness that preceded electricity, but respecting what they symbolise and what their builders intended, and adding value without distortion. Artificial light governs perception in a way daylight cannot: it can reveal what goes unnoticed by day, and it can as easily make a building unrecognisable.