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Title:
Illuminated Paris: Essays on art and lighting in the Belle Epoque

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$80.00
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Summary:
The City of Light. For many, these four words instantly conjure late nineteenth-century Paris and the garish colors of Toulouse-Lautrec’s iconic posters. More recently, the Eiffel Tower’s nightly show of sparkling electric lights has come to exemplify our fantasies of Parisian nightlife. Though we reflect longingly on such scenes, in "Illuminated Paris", Hollis Clayson shows that there’s more to these clichés than meets the eye. In this illustrated book, she traces the dramatic evolution of lighting in Paris and how artists responded to the shifting visual and cultural scenes that resulted from these technologies.

Title:
Luminous buildings : architecture of the night

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$66.00
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Summary:
At the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, the newly erected Eiffel Tower became one of the first icons of illuminated architecture, a nocturnal "lighthouse." It was not until decades later, in the 1920s, when a building’s evening façade became a central issue for residential and commercial architects, who began to look for avant-garde and aesthetically striking ways to light up their ever-taller works in all the major cities of the world. Both European and American architects wanted to distance their buildings from the garish electric signage that had come to dominate the street-level cityscape, so they worked with more delicately colored floodlights. Contemporary architects use many of the same techniques today, aided by technological advances that allow them to be implemented in particularly dramatic ways. "Luminous Buildings: Architecture of the NIght" opens a dialogue on the often overlooked but exciting connections between architecture, technology and light, offering points of reference in historical buildings and utopias, more recent designs, paintings and photographs of nighttime facades, and scholarly texts.