Urban lighting and lighting masterplans

The scale at which light stops being a project and becomes part of urban design. The studio designs the lighting of squares, monuments and public space, and the lighting masterplans that decide how a whole city is read at night, in Portugal and in Brazil.

Prominence at night is won by contrast: of quantity of light, of colour, of movement. Any building can join that competition, and when everything reaches for prominence at once the result is a luminous cacophony in which nothing stands out. A lighting masterplan settles that hierarchy at the level of the city: what should be seen first and what should recede, which colour of light belongs to which street, and how much darkness the night sky and the people who live there are owed. It is also the instrument for energy, maintenance and light pollution, taken as one decision rather than as a thousand separate ones.

Diana Delnegro coordinated Lisbon's first Urban Lighting Masterplan, still awaiting implementation, and was responsible for the lighting of the city's monuments for more than fifteen years. Her doctorate at The Bartlett, UCL, studied how artificial lighting changes the legibility of a city and the way people find their way through it at night, taking Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City to London and Lisbon with a night-time dimension. That research underpins the studio's approach at urban scale, and it is the subject she chairs at the CIE: Technical Committee 4-59 is developing the international Guide for Lighting Urban Elements, monuments, facades, bridges and sculptures, and she has taught the CIE guide to urban lighting masterplans in Italy in 2022 and in Istanbul in 2023.

At the Marquês de Pombal in Lisbon the rings of the roundabout are lit at different colour temperatures, each matching the avenues it leads to, so that drivers find their way after dark, and the statue is lit entire to state its place in the square. In Porto the lighting of the ring of medieval walls was designed to reshape the night image of the city, and in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 55 cultural landmarks of the historic centre were lit as one plan with three other lighting designers, the Mercado Público among them.