Defrosting Public Space

Sphères polaires at the Place des Festival

By the time February rolls around, Montreal has already been buried in snow for a couple of months and your mental map of the city has changed considerably. Places you’d normally linger — the steps at Place des Arts, the plaza in front of Mont-Royal metro, the giant chess board in Berri Square — have vanished from the landscape, inaccessible under the snow, unpleasant in the sub-zero wind.

Montreal’s seasonal extremes are a challenge to urban planning: how do you create a vibrant place that can function just as well on a frigid January day as on a balmy August night? Some spaces are more adaptable than others. Neighbourhood retail streets will always be lively, since people still need to hit up the supermarket, coffee shop and drug store even when it’s cold. Park lawns make good toboggan slopes and hockey rinks in the winter. But hard-surfaced plazas and squares — those quintessentially urban spaces — have a hard time finding much use between December and April.

For most of the years I lived in Montreal, the only time of the winter when a downtown square came back to life was during February’s Nuit Blanche festival, when performances and light installations take over the snowbound tarmac at Place des Arts. Lately, however, some of the ideas behind that one night of wintertime festivities has been extended throughout the winter. Last year, the recently-built Place des Festivals played host to Champ de pixels, which transformed the square into a giant Lite Brite studded with illuminated “pixels” made from overturned plastic buckets. Each bucket was equipped with motion sensors; when you walked by, the colour of the light shifted from white to red.

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Street Light

One of the things I love about Hong Kong is the city’s captivation with light. There’s the neon for which Hong Kong is famous, of course, but in recent years it has really taken to dressing up its buildings in LED displays. Here are two examples I came across while wandering around town. Below, a McDonald’s sign backlit by neon, is really nothing exceptional, but it captures how even the most banal of businesses have invested in lighting displays. Above is the new LED-lit façade of the W Hotel in Wan Chai, which fades from one colour to the next between dusk and midnight.

Market Lights

Whether it’s Sham Shui Po, Jordan, Sai Ying Pun or Kowloon City, most of Hong Kong’s older neighbourhoods have a similar aesthetic, with the same stained concrete buildings, steel doors, sidewalk altars and worn awnings. It gives the city a remarkably cohesive character despite having such a large population and such varied geography.

The same is true for Hong Kong’s many markets: whether in the street or in a market hall, fish, meat and produce is almost invariably sold under the glow of distinctive red lamps. Like a visual catchphrase, they are an instant and unconscious sign to passersby that fresh food is available.

I’ve seen these red lamps in Macau, too, and as far as I can tell they’re also used in Guangzhou and other Cantonese cities. But I’ll bet that only in Hong Kong have they been used ironically: in the past few days, walking through the trendy streets of Central, I’ve noticed the lamps in a café, an art gallery and in the window display of a high-end shoe store on Wellington Street.

Underground Art

Axel Morgenthaler’s “.98.” Video by Matt McLaughlin

It becomes obvious as soon as you enter the métro car: this will be no ordinary ride. The usual advertisements and bright orange colour have been replaced by a dark blue, wood-textured film covering the car’s interior walls. Distorted, semi-transparent photos are pasted on the windows. As the métro doors close, eerie music starts playing, followed by the mournful wail of a fog horn.

Nowhere are the odd sounds and visuals explained, which is exactly what artist Rose-Marie Goulet wanted when she created Point de fuite, an unprecedented art project that has been riding the rails of the métro’s Orange Line since last September. When she first teamed up with the Montreal Transit Corp. to create the installation, in 2006, she insisted that it not be labelled explicitly as an art project.

“It’s by chance that you come across this car,” Goulet explained. “People aren’t expecting it, that’s what’s important.”

At Henri Bourassa station, meanwhile, métro riders have even more unusual art to consider: .98, a new light mural that was inaugurated last April. Located in one of Henri Bourassa’s long corridors, the mural consists of several dozen LED lights programmed to change colours and blink in different patterns.

Art has been part of Montreal’s métro since the system first opened in 1966. In some ways, with its abundance of sculptures, murals and unique architectural details, it is a vast underground gallery through which hundreds of thousands of commuters just happen to pass every day. What makes .98 and Point de fuite stand out is the way they engage métro riders in unorthodox ways.

When lighting designer Axel Morgenthaler was commissioned to create a new work of art in the Henri-Bourassa station, he wanted to make something unusual that would grab the attention of harried commuters.

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Turn on the Lights

In Seoul, a 1970s-era department store with blank concrete walls (below) was enlivened by the addition of LED lights that turned its exterior into a dynamic light show. Photo courtesy of the Architect’s Newspaper.

On the television screen in a dark viewing room at the National Film Board in Montreal, it’s a hot summer night in 1947. Crowds throng the sidewalks of Ste. Catherine Street, bathed in bright neon, theatre marquees and billboards. “All over the city, the night air is alive with the laughter and gaiety of a carnival mood,” exclaims the narrator in the jaunty, dapper tone typical of the era. Cut to more lights; happy faces fill the frame.

It’s no coincidence that some of the most iconic and beloved images of the city date from the middle of the twentieth century, when light was warmly embraced by the world’s metropoles. Every city with dreams of making it big boasted a Great White Way, the best and brightest part of town to which crowds flocked, looking for excitement. Ever since electricity was invented in the late nineteenth century, light has been used to define urban space and create a sense of place. Stern white light projected against the facade of a church or city hall instills a sense of power and gravitas; the blinking neon and all-consuming illumination of a busy main street, by contrast, shouts, “You are here!” with giddy enthusiasm.

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