Landscape Lighting in Jasper, IN

Masonry built by people who were not in a hurry

Around two hundred settlers from Pfaffenweiler, a winegrowing village in Baden-Württemberg, arrived in Jasper in the 1850s, and Dubois County has stayed conspicuously German ever since. Jasper still counts Pfaffenweiler as its sister city, and the county museum, one of the largest in Indiana, exists largely to keep that history straight.

What that heritage left on the ground is the reason this is good country for outdoor lighting. The prevailing styles here are Greek Revival, Italianate and Romanesque, and the buildings were put up in load-bearing stone and brick by people who built the way they had built at home: thick walls, deep reveals, real arches, and stonework laid with visible care.

Deep reveals are the key phrase. When a window or a door is set back several inches into a thick masonry wall, the opening has genuine depth, and depth is the one thing light can dramatise. Graze that wall from close in and every reveal, every sill, every quoin and every change of course throws a shadow. The same technique on a modern thin-wall elevation, where the window sits nearly flush, produces almost nothing, because there is nothing there to cast.

Romanesque is the extreme case and Jasper has one of the finest examples anywhere in southern Indiana. St. Joseph Catholic Church, built in 1880 and listed on the National Register, is a heavy old-world Romanesque building with a tower standing 235 feet and four bells in it. Buildings in that idiom are defined by mass, round arches and rhythm, and lighting them is an exercise in restraint: a few well-placed sources, grazing, letting the arches and the tower carry the composition. Flooding a Romanesque elevation destroys it, because the style's whole effect is the weight of the shadow between the arches.

Church and institutional work is a larger share of what we do in Dubois County than almost anywhere else we serve, simply because there is more of it here per head than in comparable places. On buildings with significant stained glass we always raise the same point with the committee: the windows only read from outside when something is lit behind them, so the interior schedule and the exterior scheme have to be considered together rather than separately.

Residentially, Jasper runs from the older stone and brick in and around Old Jasper, where the mid-nineteenth-century Schaeffer Barn built by a Prussian family still stands near the river, out to newer subdivisions on the edges of town. The Patoka River and the Riverwalk running along it through wooded ground and open field shape a good number of properties: bottomland, mature hardwood, and gardens that back onto genuine darkness. On those lots the boundary tree line matters enormously, because without it a garden simply ends in black at its own edge.