»In which the lights in the city are art

The New York Times's Elain Sciolino ran a profile of François Jousse, the man responsible for lighting the fantastic buildings and avenues of Paris.

December 23, 2006
THE SATURDAY PROFILE; As the Sun Sets, a Parisian's Masterpiece Comes to Life

By ELAINE SCIOLINO
FRANÇOIS JOUSSE paced along the south roof of Notre-Dame, chain-smoking French cigarillos as he waited for darkness to fall.

Suddenly, the southern facade of the cathedral lit up, its pillars, gargoyles and flying buttresses adorned in white.

''Ah, this gives me such great pleasure!'' he said, warming his hands in one of the spotlight canisters. ''I truly am blessed with the most splendid job.''

Indeed, Mr. Jousse, a 64-year-old engineer, is the troubleshooter for the City of Light. As chief engineer for doctrine, expertise and technical control, he is responsible for lighting 300 of the monuments, official buildings, bridges and boulevards of the French capital.

Working with a staff of 30 decorative lighting specialists at a City Hall annex, Mr. Jousse helps create new lighting projects, lectures experts, negotiates with powerful players like the Roman Catholic Church and resolves technical problems at sites throughout the city.

One recent evening, Mr. Jousse was summoned urgently to an alleyway filled with garbage in a gritty neighborhood in the 19th Arrondissement. He had tried to mount a projector to shine one of his creations -- images of six decorative windows he had photographed -- onto a bare concrete wall there.

One was half-opened, with a red drape; another showed the silhouette of a black cat from an iconic late 19th-century poster.

But the images needed to be enlarged to match the real windows nearby. The deputy mayor of the neighborhood wanted the wall ready for Christmas. After a struggle to mount a different lens, he settled on a temporary compromise: the windows were enlarged, but two of them had to go because the existing lens could accommodate only four of that size.

''Oh, no, we can't lose the cat!'' he said. ''It's back to the lab.''

MR. JOUSSE became one of the world's foremost urban lighting experts by accident. A native of Paris, he landed a job in 1963 with the city's engineering division after graduating from college, helping widen and deepen the city's canals. He later had jobs supervising 3,000 garbage collectors and creating pedestrian streets.

In 1981, a supervisor asked him to change course once again. ''He wanted someone who would not be caught up in daily work and could think about light,'' Mr. Jousse said. ''I knew a little bit about electricity, and I was an amateur photographer. So he invented a job for me.''

At the time, most of the Paris monuments were either unlighted or only crudely illuminated with big spotlights that shone directly onto the facades. Mr. Jousse sought out urban architects and theatrical lighting experts for ideas and technical training.

He eventually created a research laboratory for the city of Paris, where he and a team began to create fixtures and to experiment with the color and intensity of light. The city now spends about $260,000 a day on its lighting.

But that does not mean everything runs smoothly. The $2.1 million project to redesign the lighting of Notre-Dame -- most recently the lighting of the south facade, which was inaugurated last week -- has involved heartbreaking compromises.

For half a century, the only hint of light on the south facade came from spotlights on the far side of the Seine River. The new lighting scheme was intended to allow spectators to discover the cathedral's facade slowly, through the power and drama of the details.

But as a national monument, Notre-Dame belongs to the French state, which has the right to veto any design decision. Stones could not be moved, walls could not be drilled. All material and equipment had to be moved in and out of Notre-Dame at night to avoid annoying tourists.

A bigger headache came from the Catholic clergy. The designers had planned to light the facade's rose window from within, so that it could be seen in full color by passers-by. The priests called the idea sacrilegious.

''They said we wanted to perturb the faithful,'' Mr. Jousse said. ''They accused us of trying to turn Notre-Dame into Disneyland.''

Then, just days before the inauguration of the new lighting of the south facade, Mr. Jousse realized it was marred by what he called ''holes of blackness.'' The solution came to him on a trip to the annual lighting festival in Lyon.

Lyon has its own school of lighting, a pointillist approach that uses small spotlights to highlight the details of its Baroque architecture for dramatic effect. The Paris school, by contrast, takes a holistic approach that bathes structures in warm, even light.

Urgent consultations followed. Until late into the night before the inauguration, electricians were busy bolting in makeshift light fixtures.

''Now, the light is stronger at the top, so that you feel that you are moving closer to heaven,'' he said.

MR. JOUSSE certainly does not have the look of a senior City Hall bureaucrat. He keeps his gray and yellow beard long and bushy. He does not remember the last time he wore a tie. He prefers to drink a dark French beer with his workers than to sip fine wine at City Hall soirees.

Tooling around town in a small, white Renault sedan with a special plate in the windshield, he parks wherever he wants -- even on the cobblestone walkway at Notre-Dame and on the quay in front of the Musée d'Orsay.

He rattles off details about lighting history: how the adorning of Paris in light began in the 14th century when Philip V the Tall ordered candles to be lighted in three sites every night, how the Paris lamppost was invented in the 18th century, how one way Paris earned the nickname City of Light was from the artificial electrical light displays at the Paris Fair of 1900.

He recalls the time a few years back when he and a team were experimenting with light on Sacré Coeur Basilica in Montmartre and colored it mauve. ''The priest came running out and ordered us to turn it off,'' Mr. Jousse said. ''We just wanted to have some fun. But Paris is a very serious city.''

The 20,000 flashing lights of the Eiffel Tower (they dazzle for 10 minutes every hour on the hour until after 1 a.m.) are, for him, ''a visual clock, like the bell of a church -- every hour the light sounds the hour.''

He shrieked when he saw for the first time that the Grand Palais, which belongs to the state, not the city, had been lighted up in bright blue-green. He stopped the car, pulled a camera and tripod out of the trunk and started taking pictures. ''I hope it's only for Christmas!'' he said. ''It's so Las Vegas!''

By contrast, he shows off the lighting of the Petit Palais, which belongs to Paris, just across the street. Its spotlights have been hidden in the tops of the streetlamps. He attracted pedestrians to the ominously dark sidewalk along the Boulevard de Bercy under the A4 highway, lighting it in bright blue.

Mr. Jousse's goal is to steep the city's structures in history and integrate them into their surroundings rather than to treat them as individual jewels that should be showcased.

''The secrets are very simple,'' he said. ''Blend light with the surroundings. Don't annoy the birds, the insects, the neighbors or the astronomers. If City Hall gave me money to do whatever I want, I'd teach people about the beauty of light. I'd make Parisians the owners of their light.''

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company