Anton Willis

Civil Twilight member Anton Willis says the idea evolved out of his master's thesis for the architecture school at the University of California, Berkeley.Inspired by the work of the artist James Turrell and by ancient astronomy-based architecture, Willis studied ways that the developed environment could respond to lunar and tidal conditions.
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To flesh out his idea, Willis enlisted his friends and collaborators Kate Lydon and Christina Seely.
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Lydon, who is currently finishing the graduate architecture program at Berkeley, is also a graphic designer and had worked with Willis on a design charrette for the adaptive reuse of a famine poorhouse in Ireland.
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Willis is from a small Mendocino County logging town, where stars and moonlight were part of everyday life.
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Willis explains that the human eye, with its com­-ple­mentary systems of rods and cones, evolved to adapt to both full-sun days and moonless nights."We can see an incredibly broad range of intensities," he says."The difference between sunlight and starlight is something like a hundred thousand orders of magnitude."Bright moonlight is in the transitional part of this range, when both rods and cones are active."It's a natural biological benchmark," Willis says, "because we evolved with it."
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What's more dangerous, Willis says, is the drastic variation in light levels within an urban area.As you drive, for example, from a well-lit major thor­oughfare to a darkened residential street, your eye does not have time to adjust, and your vision is impaired.Moonlight is much more even, he explains, and that makes it more effective for human vision.By filling in only what light is needed, lunar-resonant streetlights would help restore this evenness and actually improve nighttime visibility."We're interested in the question of standards," Willis says.
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Willis, Seely, and Lydon envision cities,hikes, performances, and fes­ti­vals.
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"We like to appeal to people's irrational aspirations as opposed to their rational, guilt-driven reactions," Willis says.
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"All of our projects deal with some question of the built and natural environments interacting or cohabiting," Willis says."Not equating urban nature with parks and greenery necessarily, but looking for deeper, more investigative ways to bring them together."The name Civil Twilight, taken from the legal term for the hour of semidarkness just after sunset and just before sunrise, suggests a bridging of the built and the natural, the civic and the personal,as well as a fascination with in-between areas in general.

For lunar-resonant streetlights to have the impact that Civil Twilight's proposal suggests, they would have to be adopted on a global scale.While Seely, Willis, and Lydon admit that it may be a hard sell with municipal utilities, they see small independ­ent entities like colleges or corporate campuses as likely early adopters.
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Civil Twilight members Kate Lydon, Anton Willis, and Christina Seely (left to right) want to return the beauty of moonlight to the urban experience.