'We're recapturing the night,' says architecturally trained lighting designer Mark Major, a principal at Speirs + Major, harking back to the obsessions of early Modernist architects such as Mendelsohn and Taut. 'Artificial light was an integral part of their thinking,' he explains. 'After the war this was lost and there was a preoccupation with numbers as lighting came to be seen as a bolt-on, but in the past 20 years its expressive potential has been rediscovered.' This renewed interest in artificial lighting is linked to the growth of what Major calls 'the night-time economy', which has an estimated turnover of £63 billion in Britain. 'Light', he says, 'is a 24/7 commodity.' Like it or not, people are as likely to use spaces by night as by day, and many work in deep-plan buildings. Our circadian rhythms are in limbo.
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