Edited by: Javier Fernández Contreras, Vera Sacchetti, and Roberto Zancan | HEAD – Publishing: Anthony Masure, Julie Enckell Julliard | Published by Spector Books, 2024 | Graphic design: Elias Erkan, Lyosha Kritsouk, Lucas Manser | Lithography: Lyosha Kritsouk, Druckhaus Sportflieger | Copyediting: Jan Caspers | Proofreading: Robert Stürzl | Printing: Druckhaus Sportflieger |139 Youri Kravtchenko | Post-scriptum: The Night, on the Margins. On the Nocturnal Studios at HEAD – Genève
For centuries, architectural theory, discourse, and agency have been based on diurnal and solar paradigms. References to the night in Vitruvius’ De Architectura are scarce; they are similarly residual in the most influential Renaissance treatises by Alberti or Palladio. Yet, long before the invention of electricity in the 19th century, the night had already been, for millennia, a central laboratory in the development of new forms of architecture and, ultimately, of living. This book is a chronological first attempt at A Nocturnal History of Architecture, an epic journey through more than 2000 years of entanglements between night and space design across different continents and geographies. From the elusive darkness of Greek temples to the constantly illuminated American suburbia, and from the presence of the moon in classic Japanese aesthetics to the Italian nightclubs of the 20th century, it reveals how the identity of human beings across time and their domestic, professional, and cultural spaces are inseparable from the night.
