LIGHT DEMONSTRATION – HERALD SQUARE

Being both an architect and an architectural illustrator, I have always been fascinated by the play of light on different materials. 

The mainly stone churches of Europe create a nice and simple pattern of shade and shadow.

The modern technology of reflective glass is nearly as simple: reflectivity and transparency combine to describe the building form.

The Beaux Art “palette” of stone and punched windows is an old variation on stone and glass.

In my own playing with “landmarks” along Broadway, NYC, I often used a mix of stone and glass. For my proposal on the block south of Greeley Square Park (32^nd Street and Broadway) I used large areas of reflective glass set into a frame of stone.

Since the building would be “facing” north toward the adjacent park, direct sun would have little chance to show off a sculpted stone façade. See Full Length Portraits & Tall Buildings.

By using reflective glass facing north, you can make the mirrored play of the northern sky contrast with the southern sky behind the building. The horizontal pattern of the southern sky would also make a nice contrast with the vertical lines of the stone framing. The finished painting above was featured on a 1994 calendar of architectural art.

At the north end of the same elongated space formed by the intersection of 6^th Avenue and Broadway is Herald Square, fronting on 35^th Street. The square was named for the adjacent headquarters building of the New York Herald newspaper, designed by Stanford White in 1908, and demolished in 1921. 

Years after painting the Greeley Block, I dropped a computer rendering of the same design onto the Herald Square site. Looking at the result made me imagine a more sculptural design along the lines of White’s eclectic 1908 style. It would give me a chance to explore a variety of light conditions via computer renderings. This was done 10 years ago, in 2011. Computer renderings were cheap and ubiquitous, but still did not have the touch of artistic magic that I have always looked for.

I modeled the idea in AutoCAD and established views from the south, as seen in the wireframes above.

Then, for the fun of it, rendered it in Accurender and pasted it into a photo of the site in Photoshop.

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So now that we have a design and a site, let me bring on the “Light Taxonomy” from my previous post. I will not use Spot Lighting or Confetti Lighting, as they are more specialized than I want here.

1.     Beaux Art

2.     Frontal

3.     Dusk

4.     Saarinen

5.     Ambient

6.     Ferriss

I now spent numerous photo sessions in Herald Square shooting the site under different light/atmosphere conditions and different times of the day. I eventually had reasonable photos of the site under all 6 light conditions.

Next, I created 6 renderings of the computer model from the same viewpoint, each differing only by the light type and corresponding atmosphere. Each rendering (via Accurender) took into account light angle, time of day, sky, sun and context color, reflected view, etc. 

Using Photoshop I pasted the building rendering into the corresponding photo, setting it behind the trees in the square itself.

Finally, I rendered (on my computer tablet) the final Photoshop’d image to make it more unified in terms of value, color and composition. If I was actually producing a finished rendering, I would take this “sketch” rendering as the general goal for the final image.

Below you will find each view’s light direction, rendered building, site paste-up and “sketch” rendering.

BEAUX ART

FRONTAL

 

DUSK

 

SAARINEN

 

AMBIENT

 

FERRISS

 

At this point, having a number of interesting possibilities, I would have gone on and painted a large, detailed illustration with plans and elevations. I did not. Life got in the way, and I am on to other projects. 
However, I hope the reader gets some ideas and inspiration from the exercise.


Addendum: the idea for a light taxonomy came from John Hedgecoe's The Photographer's Handbook, 2nd Ed. The 8 photos taken from dawn to dusk show an amazing range of color and light.