The Big Picture

Hervé Descottes; an architect working today on the contemporary New York skyline.The principal lighting designer and president of L’Observatoire International, Descottes has been charged with illuminating major landmark sites around the city from Columbus Circle to the newly renovated High Line.

“Lighting can have an incredible visible or invisible power,” says Descottes, one of whose first projects as a lighting designer, back in 1991, was to light the Mona Lisa after it was reinstalled in the Louvre. Here, he is testing his handiwork at the New York City Department of Environmental Protection’s Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Brooklyn, which was designed by Greeley and Hansen, Hazen and Sawyer and Malcolm Pirnie, in association with Polshek Partnership Architects, and will include a sculptural visitors’ center by the artist Vito Acconci and a waterfront nature walk by George Trakas.

This is a project that began a decade ago and will probably finished by 2015. The plant, with its 50-plus-acre site and eight massive sludge tanks operating 24/7, was hardly a subtle addition to the urban landscape (glowing right next to the Queens-Midtown Tunnel); the challenge, for the architects and also for Descottes, was to remain sensitive to the surrounding residential neighborhood.

In other words, Descottes says, “we didn’t want it to look like a refinery.” This is usually the kind of industrial institution that requires only functional lighting, says Descottes, who ultimately enveloped the site in a veil of blue light. (Blue, he explains, has a sense of purity and cleanness.) L’Observatoire works on some 25 projects all over the world at any given moment — from Frank Gerhy’s Louis Vuitton Foundation, under construction in the Bois de Boulogne, to a residential building to be built in Kuala Lumpur by Jean Nouvel. Still, the wastewater plant, he insists, is definitely one of the most glamorous. “Sometimes it doesn’t smell so good,” he says. “But at least it doesn’t look so bad.”