As farmers water crops by moonlight, undocumented children head to school and villagers scan the sky for surveillance airplanes—these are glimpses of a complex culture that emerges in south Lebanon after dark. In collecting some of these nightly practices, Mohamad Nahleh—lecturer in architecture and urbanism at MIT—journeyed across the landscapes of Jabal ‘Amil hoping to build a new alliance between architecture and the night. His "Path of Nightrise" research has turned into a construction to revive a forgotten river path and was published by Places Journal. The interview with Nahleh argues for a new nocturnal imagination in design and reveals, not only how the night has changed in Lebanon over time, but also how he has changed alongside it.
TS: Is the night an independent quality or the lack of daylight?
MN: It is difficult today to separate between darkness and the absence of light. This is the contemporary and scientific definition of darkness, and it definitely impacts the way we relate to the night culturally. The fact that we cannot imagine an alternative to ‘night design’ beyond ‘light design at night' both arises from and reinforces the apparent rationality of this contemporary definition. But before the Copernican Revolution, when Earth was imagined at the center of the universe, the definition of night was completely different. People believed that the universe was eternally illuminated and that the night was a black cloud of noxious fumes that descended at nightfall and blocked the sun. The logic of nightfall derives directly from this cosmological model. Night was not the absence of light, but a physical presence. And light was the absence of this physicality. This is of course one example, but there are countless other examples of how imprints of late scientific definitions continue to shape us and our biases today.
TS: How do you engage with darkness in your work?
MN: Well, by understanding, first, how the definition ‘darkness is an absence of light’ was made to carry symbolic, religious, and cultural connotations today. These connotations have been carefully designed, and now they design us. In my work, I argue against the apparent universality of this definition by centering my research on places and cultures where the night is understood in its materiality; in its ability to archive histories and legacies that thrive away from the blinding light of the sun - or the lightbulb. This is by no means a suggestion that such cultures or subcultures operate through outdated worldviews, but that the naturalized celebration of light at the expense of darkness does not represent their practices today. Theirs is an alternative nocturnal imagination, and it exists even in the densest of cities. Understanding this counter-imagination today is an invitation to separate between histories and diurnal histories, between descriptions and diurnal descriptions, and to realize that the seemingly objective voice that historicizes and describes is exceptionally light-centric.
TS: Do you relate to the global discourse surrounding light pollution today?
MN: I think looking at the transformation of something as boundless as the night sky through, perhaps not in, a single country is an important exercise because it helps us move beyond the universal and often very nostalgic story of light pollution. We've heard this story countless times, and I begin to question how productive it is today in moving toward a new nocturnal imagination. The night sky in Lebanon, of course, carries imprints of this universal story. The story of light pollution erasing even the brightest stars and constellations. The debate about whether or not a 'true’ dark sky still exists, etc. But I’m more interested in the nuances of this transformation, the history of its spread, and the direction of its movement. I’m more interested in accountability than the pretense that we are all victims of light pollution, equally affected by a noxious cloud that suddenly appeared above our heads.
TS: How has the night sky changed in Lebanon?
MN: In Lebanon, urbanization and the rise of major coastal cities orchestrated the movement of this dark ‘cloud.’ Isn’t it ironic that we have materialized, by polluting the world, the medieval understanding of the night? There is an important paradox here. It is not accidental that many agrarian villages, far from the capital and the coast, where access to proper infrastructure historically and today remains very limited, have a richer nocturnal history and legacy. And so, yes, the sky is brightening, but its impacts are very different on different people. In Lebanon, light pollution impacts more severely those whose relationships to the night sky prospered despite, and perhaps because of, a lack of economic and infrastructural development. Particularly in Jabal ‘Amil, whose libraries were burned by Ottoman governors for their contributions to the rise of the Safavid state in Persia, people anchored in the night sky new stories of resistance. These are the stories and legacies jeopardized by the brightening sky. As a native of this region, these stories, to me, are far more important than the stars that carry them.
TS: How can we imagine the hinterland where you walked 70 miles south of Beirut?
MN: It is difficult to talk about the southern hinterland without focusing on the rapidly fading separation between the city and the countryside. This separation may be ambiguous during the day, but I realized early on that it gets far clearer at nightfall. So do many other borders and boundaries that base their legitimacy on the so-called perils of darkness. It is ironic how the night, which is often criminalized for its obscurity, ends up revealing so many practices and biases that remain hidden under the glaring sun. To be clear, I'm not only talking about the visual separation between zones of light density and others of scarcity. This is a representation of the night that we have derived from satellite images of our planet after dark; images that fail to represent the night outside the binary of light and darkness, of white and black, of presence and absence, and ultimately, of virtue and vice. Instead, by ‘separation’ I mean a margin between different attitudes, be it cultural, political, religious, etc. toward light and darkness, many of which cannot be reduced to the duality of a light switch.
TS: How do these attitudes clash or coexist in Jabal ‘Amil?
MN: The southern hinterland is a patchwork of such contrasting attitudes and is home to their different custodians. It is home to those who can afford the luxury of early slumber and those whose survival depends on journeying after dark. It is home to those whose notion of safety anchors them in the blaze of a streetlight and those who find comfort and freedom in the shadows. Unfortunately, it is also home to those who have convinced themselves that policing the latter protects the former. In the hinterland, safety and opacity have a complicated relationship. It may be dangerous to walk through a dark alley in an illuminated town, but it may also be dangerous to carry a torch while moving across a gloomy field. Here, the well-established alliance between light and safety and between darkness and danger falls short. The night is far more complicated, and its denizens are many. Some are temporary visitors of the night, benefiting from the legality of their bodies across different opacities, others are permanent residents forced into the shadows by systems that have denied them the luxury of identification.
TS: You felt guilty about your Eurocentric education and your immigration to the United States. In which way is your work of rebuilding the river path a reaction to this?
MN: I once had a professor in Lebanon who told me that we should never work on projects out of guilt. And years later, I met a professor in the United States who insisted that designing in one’s hometown is no real challenge. These encounters were about very different projects, and they both occupied my thoughts for a long time. At first glance, it may seem like the river path is an antithesis, my antithesis, to both these statements and the dangerous generalizations they carry. But like "Nightrise", the reconstruction of the path exists in a grey zone and not the needle of a compass pointing in an opposite direction. I do have guilt, but it lives with accountability and an urgent sense of duty. I do feel attached to my hometown, but I question the right to call it mine now that I lived away from it for so many years. This distance is a complicated thing, and it somehow forces grief and gratitude to coexist together in my mind; grief for abandoning a stolen village, for missing its liberation, and gratitude for the experiences overseas that allowed me not to return empty-handed.
Nahleh’s journey was first published as part of his thesis project at MIT Architecture.
Light matters, a column on light and space, is written by Dr. Thomas Schielke. Based in Germany, he is fascinated by architectural lighting and works as an editor for the lighting company ERCO. He has published numerous articles and co-authored the books “Light Perspectives” and “SuperLux”. For more information check www.erco.com and www.arclighting.de.
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