Light culture in China

Keywords: light culture; night illumination; urban lighting; night landscape;

This winter is coming later than in previous years. It is unusually warm first, then unusually cold. The weather seems to be always surprising, reminiscent of China's lighting industry. After nearly a decade of raging fire, China's urban lighting has finally returned to reason in the context of national savings. But when it suddenly appears in front of people, it seems to be a little overwhelming. What happened to China's urban lighting? What will happen next? How to go below? Many people want to solve this series of questions.

China's urban lighting, like the development of other industries, has experienced initial enlightenment, rapid development and stable shocks, and is currently in an adjustment period. Just like the spiral development of the economy, it is going to be in the gestation stage before the next rapid development period. It is also like the rest of the big battle. During this period, we need to sum up the previous experience and accumulate strength to fight again. While reviewing the development of urban lighting in China in the past decade, this paper focuses on the development of the core of lighting design and construction, the development of light culture theory, and scientific prospects for its future application in lighting.

1. The proposal of light culture in China

Lighting is not a new term in China and has existed for nearly a century. Early (before the 1990s) mainly focused on the functionality of lighting, whether it was indoor or outdoor lighting, basically designed according to various lighting specifications, and to meet the visual function, and indoors Lighting is the focus. There can be no aesthetic considerations in the design, but due to functional limitations, it is difficult for designers to exert more artistic imagination. In addition, due to the constraints of national economic conditions, the objective environment does not allow designers to add more “fragments”. Therefore, at this stage, the art design theory of lighting is almost blank.

With the continuous deepening of China's reform and opening up, China's economy has undergone tremendous changes. The improvement of the economic level has objectively led people to appeal to the improvement of environmental quality, and naturally put forward new requirements for the Chinese lighting industry, thus creating an outdoor landscape lighting marked by the architectural lighting of Shanghai Bund in 1989. However, due to lack of understanding and economic underdevelopment, it was not able to be launched in large areas across the country, but only played an enlightening role in Chinese urban lighting. It was not until the return of Hong Kong in 1997 that Beijing launched a large-scale nightscape lighting construction, which opened a new chapter in Chinese landscape lighting in the true sense.

The index is coming, and the development of landscape lighting in China is only ten years. From 1997 to 2001, China's night lighting construction was in full swing, but for China, night lighting is an emerging discipline, lacking corresponding theoretical support. In general, this period belongs to the rapid development stage of landscape lighting. The construction is in the state of “Great Leap Forward”. Anyone who dares to do the lighting design can do it. As a result, many night lighting construction projects have incomplete functions, messy landscapes and poor results, forming a “one thousand city side”, light pollution, etc. Many negative phenomena. After these problems appeared, while the industry began to reflect, the theoretical community also began to explore the planning and design theory of night lighting. During the period of a large number of engineering practices in this period, the author conducted an in-depth analysis of the design theory of landscape lighting after continuous exploration and summarization. Later, he first proposed the design concept of “light culture” in China, and received extensive response from the industry. At the "China's First Modern Urban Light Culture Forum" held in Tianjin in May 2004, delegates discussed the issue of light culture from different angles. Since then, the author and experts from Tianjin and other places have been in China Urban Lighting (International). The seminar, the "Lighting Technology Forum (Chongqing 2004)" and other occasions promoted the concept of light culture, so that this concept is gradually recognized and accepted by the Chinese industry, and is continuously applied in the domestic lighting design practice.

Since 2002, all parties in the construction project have gradually realized that the successful construction comes from reasonable planning. Therefore, all cities in China have started the night lighting planning, and the construction of night lighting in various cities has gradually realized the guidance under the lighting planning. At the stage of scientific construction, at this time, the night illumination of Chinese cities gradually formed a scale, and it became a real urban lighting. This concept and related terminology was defined and fixed by the Ministry of Construction in the form of government documents in November 2004. The document clearly defines urban lighting including urban functional lighting and landscape lighting.