4: The City as Text

The nature of environmental print is rapidly changing. Nowhere is this clearer than in an environment such as Times Square in New York City—particularly at night. The idea of cities lit at night—ones that often include electrified signs—is taken for granted by most people. In fact, the idea of the city as an electrified space almost certainly dates back to the electrification of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York in 1901.

Electrified signs were seen by the German Bauhaus Movement as redefining the nighttime space of cities—one that introduced text into the nighttime space—literally bringing the written word into spaces that had previously been dark, or at best, dimly illuminated by the gaslights of Victorian culture.