Zurich

2023.08.26　Hikaru Kimurar＋Noriko Higashi Hida Furukawa is located in the northern part of Gifu Prefecture and is a basin surrounded by mountains. A city walk was held to explore the streets with white walls that have remained since ancient times, temples and the clear Setogawa River where about 1,000 carp swim. Participants were given flashlights and conducted a lighting experiment to consider the night view of Hida Furukawa. In response to a request from Hida City to “create a nightscape that the citizens of Hida can be proud of,” we held a town walk and lighting experiment with the people of Hida Furukawa. The town of Furukawa has old temples, sake breweries, and clear streams, all within walking distance. The streets have retained their Japanese architectural structure, preserving their classic beauty. 18 participants and we walked through the town, gazing at the Furukawa at night.（Hikaru Kimura)  The Lecture by Lighting Detectives Before embarking on a city walk, Mr. Mende gave a lecture on the importance of nighttime landscaping and lighting in urban development. Members Higashi and Kimura also explained the Lighting Detectives’ method of walking around the city at night and taught how to use an illuminance meter and flashlight. Afterwards, the mayor of Hida City shared his thoughts on night views through a conversation with Mr. Mende. The mayor’s wish was summed up in one phrase: “I want to create a nightscape that the people of Hida Furukawa will be…

26 September 2008 The Lighting Detectives are always up to something unusual and for this city walk we rented a double-decker, open-air bus to cruise the streets of Tokyo. A specially planned route took us from Marunouchi→around the Imperial Palace→past the Diet Building→through the middle of Ginza→across the Rainbow Bridge→around Odaiba→back through Toyosu→across Kachidoki Bridge→up Haruumi Avenue→back to Marunouchi. It was a neck-kinking, eye-popping, wind-in-your-hair tour! Sore Neck after a Magical Tour of Ginza Group photo in Marunouchi before the start of the tour. An air of excitement and anticipation as members boarded the bus for the 2-hour night tour of Tokyo. Driving through the heart of Ginza was the highlight for many on the tour. New and old methods for street and facade lighting were on parade, an excellent opportunity for comparing and contrasting lighting eras. Office tower lighting and residential condominium lighting dominated the scene on the drive back from Odaiba to Marunouchi. While white fluorescent lighting was the predominate color some condominiums glowed a soft orange. Members all had stiff necks after 2-hours of continuous looking up, but nobody seemed to mind. Chatter even died down as the bus started along the route, as members seemed to take this opportunity very seriously. On this bus tour I accomplished something that I am too embarrassed to do any other day; Crank my head back and look up as we drove through the streets! As anybody knows, Tokyo is…

This excerpt is from an essay Mende contributed in December 2001. During a period of time, I often felt that my thoughts were rather unstable.  I had a habit of continuing conversations without coming to clear conclusions about whether something was good or bad, whether I liked it or disliked it. In essence, I had an indecisive personality that gauged the other person’s reactions while engaged in conversation. One could say this is typical of Japanese people, but I believe my profession as a designer contributed significantly to this tendency. We lighting designers have a job that involves listening to many people’s demands while skillfully handling contradictory conditions to solve a puzzle. It was after meeting Koharu Kisaragi that I was strongly compelled to reflect on this weakness of mine. Koharu Kisaragi, in complete contrast to me at that time, spoke about the light of the modern city with a strikingly fresh perspective.“I love glowing vending machines.” That was her first statement when we invited her to appear at the Lighting Detectives Practical Workshop Series that we organized in the fall of 1996. “Vending machines may seem to be everywhere in the city, but they’re actually passive. They can’t do anything on their own unless we humans approach them and access them. They don’t know what to do with themselves, and that blankness reminds me of urban Japanese people. Everyone is in a crowd, yet they’re alone…” she continued. At…

Date of Issue：February 7, 2019 ・Activity 1／City Night Survey：Rio de Janeiro/ （2018/10/13-10/23） ・Activity 2／TNT Forum 2018 in Santiago（2018/10/17-10/18） City Night Survey：Rio de Janeiro/ Santiago 2018/10/13-23 Mikine Yamamoto + Kouki Iwanaga This was our first South American survey in about 15 years. We tracked the light expression of Rio de Janeiro, a port city marked by both entertainment and poverty, which hosted the FIFA World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016 and has become increasingly international. While possessing famous coasts like Copacabana and Ipanema and being counted as one of the world’s three most beautiful harbors, it also has the “favela” slums covering its hillsides. Surrounded by magnificent nature, Santiago, Chile’s largest city, has annual rainfall of only about 360mm, meaning it is sunny for most of the year. We investigated the lighting situation of this city blessed with natural light. The nightscape from Pão de Açúcar: A beautiful contrast created by the rich topography Viewing Copacabana Beach from Pão de Açúcar Favelas built on the mountain slopes ■Rio de Janeiro / Brazil Rio de Janeiro is an international tourist city that hosted the Carnival and the Olympics in 2016. It is said to be a microcosm of the country, where light and darkness coexist: scenic areas with beautiful topography blending nature and culture are situated next to slums. We surveyed the light expressions of this city, which has various faces, including the glamorous light of tourist and resort…

2022.10.01-10.03 Shunichi Ikeda + Genki Watanabe Koyasan (Wakayama Prefecture), a sacred site of Japanese Buddhism with a history of 1,200 years, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2004 and again in 2016, and is one of the world’s most renowned religious cities. It is also a popular tourist destination, attracting many international visitors prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the distinctive light environment created by the numerous temples and shrines, as well as through the experience of staying at temple lodgings (shukubō), we conducted an investigation into this extraordinary lighting culture from the perspective of the Lighting Detectives. Koyasan is a town situated in a mountain basin at an altitude of 800 meters, surrounded by peaks of around 1,000 meters in northern Wakayama Prefecture. It was founded about 1,200 years ago, in the early Heian period, by the Buddhist monk Kōbō Daishi (Kūkai) as a sacred site of Japanese Buddhism, with Danjō Garan serving as the central temple complex of this religious city.Originally, the entire area of Koyasan was considered part of the grounds of Kongōbu-ji Temple.For us, this was the first time to focus on a religious city in an urban lighting survey. We wanted to examine what the nightscape of this temple town looks like and how the lighting culture of Japan and Buddhism manifests itself in various aspects. ■Okunoin, Kongōbu-ji, Head Temple of Koyasan Shingon Buddhism Okunoin is an expansive cemetery stretching about 2…