LIGHTING PLAN SHINES NEW LIFE ON OLD MONTREAL.
Notre-Dame Basilica is the jewel in the crown of Montreal’s Plan lumière
The sight of the Notre-Dame Basilica punctuates Place d’Armes, and not just because it’s a world-renowned sacred structure. On July 9, a new LED lighting scheme was switched on, making the building’s unique architectural features discernible from afar. This skilful illumination transforms the basilica into a beacon that both guides us in the darkness and helps us absorb our surroundings.
The lighting of the Notre-Dame Basilica’s façade is part of a deliberate urban landscaping initiative called Plan lumière, which started in 1999. The goal was to breathe new life into historic Old Montreal using strategic lighting design.
To do this, the City of Montreal and Quebec’s Ministry of Culture and Communications hired the urban and landscape architects at Groupe Cardinal Hardy, as well as lighting designer Gilles Arpin from Éclairage Public. Since then, Arpin has been lighting much of Old Montreal, including Place JacquesCartier, St-Paul and de la Commune Sts., City Hall, Bonsecours Market and several buildings on McGill St.
Plan lumière is 80 per cent complete. Still left to light are buildings along Notre-Dame St., between Place d’Armes and Place Jacques-Cartier, the Palais de justice, the modern National Bank building, the St-Sulpice Seminary, and more structures on McGill St. Because the lighting design is tied to work on the electrical infrastructures, it’s difficult for Arpin to give an estimated date of completion. But because most of the work is done, we can appreciate how Arpin’s scheme has uplifted the neighbourhood.
If we compare what Old Montreal was like before the Plan lumière, many of us will recall that the area was more appealing to tourists than locals. While Montrealers could appreciate its beauty by day, it was unsettlingly opaque at night. Then, in the past few years, Old Montreal had a resurgence.
In a story I wrote for The Gazette last fall about our city’s emerging neighbourhoods, Old Montreal restaurateurs remarked that 75 per cent of their clientele is now made up of Montrealers, and 15 per cent of them come from surrounding regions. The remaining 10 per cent are tourists. Meanwhile, Mario Lafrance, director of the Société de développement commercial du Vieux-Montréal, said 48,000 people work in Old Montreal, where 15 or 20 years ago, that number was less than 10,000. Old Montreal’s population has more than doubled in 10 years.
Redesigned public spaces and pedestrian paths, as well as renovated condos and offices, certainly contributed to Old Montreal’s renaissance. But the Plan lumière is where it all began.
Defining Notre-Dame
The Notre-Dame Basilica’s exterior had already been illuminated in 2009, but the new lighting is a retrofit project that uses more than 150 LED fixtures to better define the church using much less energy.
The work of architect James O’Donnell, construction of NotreDame Basilica’s exterior took place between 1824 and 1829 in the Gothic Revival style. A Gothic structure is characterized by its emphasis on height, ogival or pointed arches, ribbed vaulted ceilings, and large windows, which allow natural light to swath the interiors.
The church is famous for events such as Céline Dion’s wedding to René Angélil in 1994, and for the funeral in 2000 of former prime minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau. A popular destination for both tourists and Montrealers, it’s at the core of Old Montreal, itself a testament to four centuries’ worth of architectural history. Even Place d’Armes, the public square just across from the basilica, is bordered by the art deco Aldred building to the east, the beaux-arts Bank of Montreal building to the north, and the modern National Bank building to the west.
The lighting concept for the NotreDame Basilica began by acknowledging its relationship with Place d’Armes, where people’s experience of the church tends to take root. “We had lit all the surrounding buildings,” Arpin recalls, “and there are only four lamp posts on all four corners of the (Place d’Armes) square that light it. We pointed out that this space is intricately linked to the Notre-Dame Basilica, and that the church needed to be relamped, and have its ballasts and light fixtures changed.”
When Arpin designs an exterior lighting scheme, he does it in three layers: function, format, and feeling; ground level, core or “heart;” and summit. He wanted to bring out the structure’s height and majesty while also making it emanate from within.
“From the start, the basic concept was to connect the interior blue vaulted ceiling to the outside,” Arpin says. So the arched entrance and backlit tower windows all glow of blue. “If you direct the eye toward the doorway, you’re also directing it toward the three statues built into the façade just above the entrance, and also to the backlit cross that’s above them.”
Then there’s the core of the Basilica, which, Arpin says, is where the eye logically wanders. “When people look ahead, their perception is like a conical spectrum that includes the heart of a building,” he explains. “So lighting the heart of a building is like guiding a person’s gaze at street level.”
This is where Arpin can focus on the features that make the basilica unique, and he uses accent lighting and grazing to do it. In accenting, narrow beam angles bring details — like cornices, mouldings and statues — to the foreground. Grazing, on the other hand, involves skimming a surface with light to exaggerate its textures. In this case, because the light sources point up while grazing the façades, they call attention to the building’s height and its emergence from the ground. Arpin also left spaces between the linear fixtures, grazing the surfaces to create more dramatic contrasts between light and shadows.
These lighting techniques are especially effective on the tall, stone buildings so common in Old Montreal. Not only do they make a building’s details discernible from a distance, they allow onlookers to appreciate its architecture at night in a way they can’t during the day. “Sometimes, the shadows help us understand a building,” Arpin says.
Conversely, the sun — a big, blazing light source — provides general illumination at such a wide angle and such a powerful luminosity that it flattens most of those details. “For a long time, we tried to recreate that in architectural lighting,” Arpin points out. “We’d place large projectors at a distance and floodlight the façade in a way that would flatten it.” These days, LED fixtures can be configured to have tight beam angles direct light only at the areas that need to be illuminated.
Since the stones on many of Old Montreal’s buildings are beige or grey, Arpin is careful to choose white light tones that complement the façades. On Notre-Dame Basilica, Arpin uses a white colour temperature of 2,700 kelvin (K) and, in some parts, 3,000 K. This is a warm, yellowish tint that works in harmony with the church’s smoky surface.
The roofing and the top of the towers are backlit using a much cooler colour temperature of 6,500 K, which, while brighter, creates a rather subtle contour of the church. “I’m drawing the nocturnal silhouette of the towers without lighting them directly,” Arpin explains. (Read more on lighting temperatures in the sidebar story.)
Enhancing the basilica’s design through light creates a relationship with the building that wouldn’t exist otherwise. More than a sacred structure, it becomes a public space that takes on a completely different personality at night. Most interestingly, making a building discernible at night improves the ambient light on the street.
“In terms of our own perception, when we see lit surfaces, we might not be as aware of the actual light surrounding us, but we become more conscious of the space surrounding us,” Arpin says. “That makes us feel as safe as an environment where the light is at full intensity.”
So in designing the lighting of the Notre-Dame Basilica, Arpin essentially defined the space surrounding it, and our rapport with it.
Local light sourcing
When seeking LED light sources for the project, Arpin looked no fur- ther than Point-St-Charles, where architectural LED lighting manufacturer Lumenpulse is located, and where the company’s luminaires (or fixtures) are also designed and assembled.
“We compare luminaires (from different companies) on a regular basis,” Arpin tells me. “Lumenpulse is a local manufacturer of an international calibre.” Part of that is due to Lumenpulse’s home advantage in Montreal. The company tests its outdoor lighting equipment in the harsh weather conditions Montreal is famous for, so they’re renowned for their sturdiness.
Arpin has used Lumenpulse’s LED luminaires on other Plan lumière projects like McGill St., Place Jacques-Cartier, and the Clock Tower in the Old Port. In the next few years, he’ll be using Lumenpulse to redesign the lighting of St-Joseph’s Oratory. While the energy efficiency of LED luminaires is an incentive for Arpin, as a designer, form factor is also a crucial consideration.
“For us, the advantage of working with a local partner is the opportunity to make adaptations,” he says. “With LED, you can adapt the light sources to just about any situation.”
Arpin particularly likes Lumenpulse’s Lumenfacade fixture, a slim, linear luminaire that can discreetly be integrated into a building façade. “Because it’s horizontal, it can mimic a window ledge, without blending into it completely. This allows us to express the same form that we’re lighting, so it’s a big strength.”
Lumenpulse also enjoys collaborating with Arpin: “He’s always challenging our ability to respond with new ideas and solutions,” says Jesse Lilley, vice-president of marketing at Lumenpulse.
Since the Plan lumière is a publicly funded project, Gilles Dufort, the city’s project co-ordinator in Old Montreal, is always pleased when LED can be used. “LED technology lets us save on maintenance and energy consumption costs, since the latest fixtures are more efficient in terms of output and lamp lifetime,” he says. Because the Lumenpulse luminaires used on the Notre-Dame Basilica have a lifetime of 120,000 hours, the city avoids frequent repairs and lamp changes.
Smart restoration
To relight the Notre-Dame Basilica, Arpin used a combination of metal halide, a compound of metal and halogen, and Lumenpulse’s LED fixtures. While LED luminaires are known for their low energy consumption, Arpin also saw to it that the metal halides be replaced with low-watt versions (from 150 W to 70 for the same luminosity).
The Basilica’s total energy consumption went from 22,000 W to 11,000 W. Because the building is lit from dusk to 1 a.m., Arpin says, the approximate yearly cost of keeping the building illuminated is estimated at $2,725.
Lilley says that lighting can be an affordable way to breathe new life into a neighbourhood. “In a new building project, lighting equipment will generally only account for 1 or 2 per cent of the total cost. However, once built, lighting will often account for 20 per cent of a building’s operational costs. So the impact of lighting is very significant overall,” he says.
Here, the impact of strategic, lowenergy lighting was not only the restoration of Old Montreal, but also of our relationship with it. “Lighting in the urban field is a layer of planning,” Arpin concludes. “To me, good lighting should be discreet. The art is not the lighting; it’s what we light.”