Landscape Lighting in Evansville, IN

Two historic districts that want opposite things

Evansville is unusual among the cities we serve in that its preservation districts are genuinely distinct from one another architecturally, and the lighting answer flips completely between them.

Riverside is the older and the more varied. The preservation area covers 238 properties, was written into local code as far back as 1962, and carries what is generally regarded as one of Indiana's premier collections of historic architecture, running from the 1830s through to the 1920s. What sits along those streets is Queen Anne, Italianate, Colonial Revival, Neoclassical, Arts and Crafts, Prairie and Art Deco, sometimes within a single block, including commissions from firms like Frank Schlotter and Anderson & Veatch.

For a lighting designer that variety is the entire brief. A Queen Anne is all projection and incident: turrets, bays, spindlework, bracket detail, wrap-around porches. It wants grazing light that travels up the face and lets every one of those projections throw a small shadow, because the shadows are what the architecture is made of. An Art Deco or Prairie elevation two doors down is the reverse. Those buildings were designed around horizontal massing and unbroken planes, and grazing them only announces that the plane is flat. They want washing, from further back, at a steeper angle, so the mass reads as one confident block.

Getting those two backwards on the same street is the most common fault we find on facades lit by somebody else in this city.

Lincolnshire, established as a district in 1999 and running from Lincoln Avenue south to Powell and from College Highway east to Lodge, is a different century and a different mood. Its ninety-five contributing buildings are largely Colonial Revival, Tudor Revival, English Cottage and French Eclectic: steep roofs, half-timbering, stone chimneys, deep-set entries and a lot of texture concentrated in small areas.

Tudor Revival in particular is one of the most rewarding things we get to light. The half-timbering is a relief pattern, and light crossing it at a shallow angle turns the timber into a drawn line across the stucco. The steep gable ends need light arriving from above rather than from the ground, or the beam runs straight past the roofline into the sky and anyone in the drive is looking into a bright source. On these houses the fixture almost always belongs in the soffit or in a tree across the lawn rather than staked in the bed.

Out on the east side the work changes again: larger lots, more pools, newer planting, and far more of the light having to come from the structure because there is not yet a canopy worth borrowing from. Mount Auburn and the neighbourhoods around it sit somewhere in between, with enough mature trees to make canopy work possible on a good proportion of properties.