Dimming the Lights for Birds: Ending the Glass Crash

By Jane Holtz Kay

What would urban life be without its skyline emblazoned against the blackened midnight sky? The image of Bright Lights, Big City, depicted on the novel's cover almost a quarter century ago, displayed the glowing façades of the World Trade Towers. And, for all that loss, the image of the high-rise with its grid of glass panes continues to hold sway as the symbol of urbanity for corporations and architects alike. Or does it? And should architects think in a less flighty fashion.

With interior lights on 24-hour duty, the high-rise skyline is a tribute to the romance of urban life, the power to soar, and all the clichés of cities that never sleep.

But, for all the architectural panache, a growing constituency calls this brilliant display of wattage--the sparkling cloak of eventide--- a death trap: a bird-slaying apparatus too seldom contemplated, a waste of energy in a world ever-more short of it and the producer of the harmful greenhouse gases that create global warming? Equally, advocates for our feathered friends reckon that the birds' collisions into brightly lighted glass windows slaughter 100 million to 1 billion birds a year in this country.

Thus the effort to reduce the skyscrapers' nocturnal glow is two-fold. While environmentalists and ornithologists deplore the massacre of the birds, energy-conscious Americans criticize the associated fuel consumption of that illumination.

Notwithstanding, a constituency of Nantucket nimbys who should, one would assume, care for the planet along with the birds, has grabbed attention by fighting against the energy-saving wind turbines slated for Nantucket Sound--even as these vacationers' hometown office buildings slay more birds than any wind farm could.

As for the battered birds, the skyscrapers' shiny glass continues to weaken the migrating flocks' navigation powers by fatally reflecting the images of trees and sky that draw them to smash into these façades. Recently, however, the news improved. The "Birds and Building Forum," cosponsored by Chicago's Department of the Environment and Department of Planning and Development, as well as Illinois Institute of Technology, aimed to have it otherwise. Last March, just after the ivory-billed woodpecker--thought to be extinct--made its stunning, and now suspect, reappearance, forum organizers gathered architects, designers, and bird partisans to study and mitigate these avian deaths and crashes.

On the pro-bird side of this battle sat groups such as the Bird Conservation Network-a coalition of bird clubs, Audubon chapters, and ornithological societies located primarily in the Chicago metropolitan area--plus the Fatal Light Awareness Program (FLAP), a 12-year-old nonprofit in Toronto dedicated to making the built environment safer for birds. Both organizations advocate "lights out" programs in their respective cities by asking businesses to dim building lights in towers from ll:00 p.m. until daylight during spring migration, and from March and June (Abby;just cause the were too many "froms").

Lately, the mission has expanded by seeking to reduce bird deaths in low, lakeside residential communities and lower-scale buildings beyond the urban core.

Mostly, though, bird health is much too low on the designer's list. "I've held hundreds of injured birds in my hands," says Randi Doeker, president of the Chicago Ornithological Society, which works with public agencies to broadcast the message to largely indifferent designers and developers that the birds "can't tell the difference between the reflections and the sky." The society works with architects and designers to explore new building skins that discourage, rather than attract, birds, as well as to pull plants away from their window-view and station shades or flags to divert birds from hitting the façades.

Adding to this repertoire of bird-saving strategies, avian advocates offer an ornithological manual for creating bird-conscious architecture: Shut down the lights, re-program automated lighting systems, and use solar-reflective blinds or curtains. Scientists, too, have honed in on the negative effects of light and its needless fossil-fuel emissions in the empty hours of high-rise buildings. And, in fact, a new vocabulary has emerged to categorize "crimes" of light: "light trespass" (when the back-porch antiburglar light shines next door); "sky glow" (when it chars the atmosphere, hiding the stars); and the familiar "glare" that affects everyday citizens and contributes to CO2 emissions.

Whether to stop birds from slamming into skyscrapers or to curtail global warming and environmental waste, it is high time for architects to flip the switch on the lights in glass buildings and stop the environmental and avian assault ...off.

This article appeared in Architecture magazine, August 2005.

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