Lighting monuments: Reflections on outdoor lighting and environmental appraisal

For more than 10 years, highlighting urban pattern, revealing the artifacts in our surroundings, and providing relationships among the elements of cities, outdoor lighting practice gained more significance. The following study aims at suggesting the needs for monument lighting, taking it as an essential architectural and outdoor lighting issue, and focuses on aspects to be considered both in the approach and application phases by discussing some examples from Ankara, the capital of Turkey. In order to determine approaches in attaining an effective lighting scheme, a case study was conducted. The participants were shown a series of photographs of the Bilkent University Atatürk Monument and its model taken under daylight and artificial lighting conditions, and the differences and tendencies in their perceptional preferences were examined. The results implied that lighting the monument with down-lighting technique is more preferable compared to up-lighting. The findings also suggested that there is no significant perceptional difference on the figure when daylight condition (direction) is imitated using artificial lighting sources. In the analyses, it was also observed that the difference in the incident angle (45∘∘ and 60∘∘) of light did not considerably change the perception of participants.