Waterfront redevelopments built out over more than a decade almost always end up with a skyline that reads as a lighting free-for-all, because every building’s individual design team makes reasonable choices in isolation that add up to no shared hierarchy. We wrote a nighttime lighting guideline document — colour temperature ranges, brightness ceilings by building tier, dark-sky setbacks near the water — that every future building’s independent lighting consultant has to design against as a condition of the masterplan approval.
Seven years in, four separate architecture firms have designed buildings under the guideline and the district still reads as a single authored skyline rather than a collection of unrelated towers.