+ Why Neon Is the Ultimate Symbol of the 20th Century
+
+
+
+
+ The once-ubiquitous form of lighting was novel when it first emerged in the early 1900s,
+ though it has since come to represent decline.
+
+
+ In the summer of 1898, the Scottish chemist Sir William Ramsay made a discovery that
+ would eventually give the Moulin Rouge in Paris, the Las Vegas Strip, and New York’s
+ Times Square their perpetual nighttime glow. Using the boiling point of argon as a
+ reference point, Ramsay and his colleague Morris W. Travers isolated three more noble
+ gases and gave them evocative Greek names: neon, krypton, and xenon. In so doing, the
+ scientists bestowed a label of permanent novelty on the most famous of the trio—neon,
+ which translates as “new.” This discovery was the foundation on which the French
+ engineer Georges Claude crafted a new form of illumination over the next decade. He
+ designed glass tubes in which neon gas could be trapped, then electrified, to create a
+ light that glowed reliably for more than 1,000 hours.
+
+
+ In the 2012 book L’être et le Néon, which
+ has been newly translated into English by Michael Wells, the philosopher Luis de
+ Miranda weaves a history of neon lighting as both artifact and metaphor. Being and
+ Neonness, as the book is called in its English edition, isn’t a typical
+ material history. There are no photographs. Even de Miranda’s own example of a neon deli
+ sign spotted in Paris is re-created typographically, with text in all caps and dashes
+ forming the border of the sign, as one might attempt on Twitter. Fans of Miami Beach’s
+ restored Art Deco hotels and California’s bowling alleys might be disappointed by the
+ lack of glossy historical images. Nonetheless, de Miranda makes a convincing case for
+ neon as a symbol of the grand modern ambitions of the 20th century.
+
+
+ De Miranda beautifully evokes the notion of neon lighting as an icon of the 1900s in his
+ introduction: “When we hear the word neon, an image pops into our heads: a
+ combination of light, colors, symbols, and glass. This image is itself a mood. It
+ carries an atmosphere. It speaks … of the essence of cities, of the poetry of nights, of
+ the 20th century.” When neon lights debuted in Europe, they seemed dazzlingly
+ futuristic. But their husky physicality started becoming obsolete by the 1960s, thanks
+ in part to the widespread use of plastic for fluorescent signs. Neon signs exist today,
+ though they’ve been eclipsed by newer technologies such as digital billboards, and they
+ remain charmingly analog: Signs must be made by hand because there’s no cost-effective
+ way to mass-produce them.
+
+
+ In the 1910s, neon started being used for cosmopolitan flash in Paris at precisely the
+ time and place where the first great modernist works were being created. De Miranda’s
+ recounting of the ingenuity emerging from the French capital a century ago is thrilling
+ to contemplate: the cubist art of Pablo Picasso, the radically deconstructed fashions of
+ Coco Chanel, the stream-of-consciousness poetry of Gertrude Stein, and the genre-defying
+ music of Claude Debussy—all of which heralded a new age of culture for Europe and for
+ the world.
+
+ Amid this artistic groundswell, Georges Claude premiered his neon lights at the Paris Motor Show in
+ December 1910, captivating visitors with 40-foot-tall tubes affixed to the building’s
+ exterior. The lights shone orange-red because neon, by itself, produces that color.
+ Neon lighting is a catchall term that describes the technology of glass tubing
+ that contains gas or chemicals that glow when electrified. For example, neon fabricators
+ use carbon dioxide to make white, and mercury to make blue. Claude acknowledged at the
+ time that neon didn’t produce the ideal color for a standard light bulb and insisted
+ that it posed no commercial threat to incandescent bulbs.
+
+
+ Of course, the very quality that made neon fixtures a poor choice for interior lighting
+ made them perfect for signs, de Miranda notes. The first of the neon signs was switched
+ on in 1912, advertising a barbershop on Paris’s Boulevard Montmartre, and eventually
+ they were adopted by cinemas and nightclubs. While Claude had a monopoly on neon
+ lighting throughout the 1920s, the leaking of trade secrets and the expiration of a
+ series of patents broke his hold on the rapidly expanding technology.
+
+ In the following decades, neon’s nonstop glow and vibrant colors turned ordinary
+ buildings and surfaces into 24/7 billboards for businesses, large and small, that wanted
+ to convey a sense of always being open. The first examples of neon in the United States
+ debuted in Los Angeles, where the Packard Motor Car Company commissioned two large
+ blue-and-orange Packard signs that literally stopped
+ traffic because they distracted motorists. The lighting also featured heavily at the
+ Chicago Century of Progress Exposition in 1933 and at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York.
+ At the latter event, a massive neon sign reading Futurama
+ lit the way to a General Motors exhibition that heralded “The World of Tomorrow.”
+
+
+ Workers remove a hammer and sickle from a neon sign that reads “Glory to Communism,”
+ visible on the roof of the Communist-run electricity-board headquarters in
+ Czechoslovakia in 1989. (AP)
+
+ De Miranda points out that businesses weren’t alone in embracing neon’s ability to
+ spread messages effectively. By the middle of the century, the lighting was being
+ adopted for more political purposes. “In the 1960s, the Soviets deployed a vast
+ ‘neonization’ of the Eastern bloc capitals to emulate capitalist metropolises,” de
+ Miranda writes. “Because consumer shops were rare in the Polish capital [of Warsaw],
+ they did not hesitate to illuminate the façades of public buildings.” In other words, as
+ opposed to the sole use of the more obvious forms of propaganda via posters or slogans,
+ the mass introduction of neon lighting was a way of getting citizens of Communist cities
+ to see their surroundings with the pizzazz and nighttime glamour of major Western
+ capitals.
+
+ Neon, around this time, began to be phased out, thanks to cheaper and less
+ labor-intensive alternatives. In addition, the global economic downturn of the 1970s
+ yielded a landscape in which older, flickering neon signs, which perhaps their owners
+ couldn’t afford to fix or replace, came to look like symbols of decline. Where such
+ signs were once sophisticated and novel, they now seemed dated and even seedy.
+
+
+ Cities are changing fast. Keep up with the CityLab Daily newsletter.
+
+
+ De Miranda understands this evolution by zooming out and looking at the 1900s as the
+ “neon century.” The author draws a parallel between the physical form of neon lights,
+ which again are essentially containers for electrified gases, and that of a glass
+ capsule—suggesting they are a kind of message in a bottle from a time before the First
+ World War. “Since then, [neon lights] have witnessed all the transformations that have
+ created the world we live in,” de Miranda writes. “Today, they sometimes seem to
+ maintain a hybrid status, somewhere between junkyards and museums, not unlike European
+ capitals themselves.”
+
+
+ Martin Wartman, a student at Northern Kentucky University, works on a neon sign at
+ the Neonworks of Cincinnati workshop connected to the American Sign Museum, in 2016.
+ (John Minchillo / AP)
+
+ Another mark of neon’s hybridity: Its obsolescence started just as some contemporary
+ artists began using the lights in their sculptures. Bruce Nauman’s 1968 work My
+ Name as Though It Were Written on the Surface of the Moon poked fun at
+ the space race—another symbol of 20th-century technological innovation whose moment has
+ passed. The piece uses blue “neon” letters (mercury, actually) to spell out the name
+ “bruce” in lowercase cursive, with each character repeated several times as if to convey
+ a person speaking slowly in outer space. The British artist Tracey Emin has made sculptures
+ that resemble neon Valentine’s Day candies: They read as garish and sentimental
+ confections with pink, heart-shaped frames that surround blue text fragments. Drawing on
+ the nostalgia-inducing quality of neon, the sculptures’ messages are redolent of
+ old-fashioned movie dialogue, with titles such as “You Loved Me Like a Distant Star” and
+ “The Kiss Was Beautiful.”
+
+
+ Seeing neon lighting tamed in the context of a gallery display fits comfortably with de
+ Miranda’s notion that neon technology is like a time capsule from another age. In
+ museums, works of neon art and design coexist with objects that were ahead of their own
+ time in years past—a poignant fate for a technology that made its name advertising “The
+ World of Tomorrow.” Yet today neon is also experiencing a kind of craft revival. The
+ fact that it can’t be mass-produced has made its fabrication something akin to a
+ cherished artisanal technique. Bars and restaurants hire firms such as Let There Be Neon
+ in Manhattan, or the L.A.-based master
+ neon artist Lisa Schulte, to create custom signs and works of art. Neon’s story
+ even continues to glow from inside museums such as California’s Museum of Neon Art and the Neon Museum in Las
+ Vegas. If it can still be a vital medium for artists and designers working today,
+ “neonness” need not only be trapped in the past. It might also capture the mysterious
+ glow of the near future—just as it did a century ago.
+
+ Why Neon Is the Ultimate Symbol of the 20th Century
+
+
+
+
+ The once-ubiquitous form of lighting was novel when it first emerged in the early 1900s,
+ though it has since come to represent decline.
+
+
+ In the summer of 1898, the Scottish chemist Sir William Ramsay made a discovery that
+ would eventually give the Moulin Rouge in Paris, the Las Vegas Strip, and New York’s
+ Times Square their perpetual nighttime glow. Using the boiling point of argon as a
+ reference point, Ramsay and his colleague Morris W. Travers isolated three more noble
+ gases and gave them evocative Greek names: neon, krypton, and xenon. In so doing, the
+ scientists bestowed a label of permanent novelty on the most famous of the trio—neon,
+ which translates as “new.” This discovery was the foundation on which the French
+ engineer Georges Claude crafted a new form of illumination over the next decade. He
+ designed glass tubes in which neon gas could be trapped, then electrified, to create a
+ light that glowed reliably for more than 1,000 hours.
+
+
+ In the 2012 book L’être et le Néon, which
+ has been newly translated into English by Michael Wells, the philosopher Luis de
+ Miranda weaves a history of neon lighting as both artifact and metaphor. Being and
+ Neonness, as the book is called in its English edition, isn’t a typical
+ material history. There are no photographs. Even de Miranda’s own example of a neon deli
+ sign spotted in Paris is re-created typographically, with text in all caps and dashes
+ forming the border of the sign, as one might attempt on Twitter. Fans of Miami Beach’s
+ restored Art Deco hotels and California’s bowling alleys might be disappointed by the
+ lack of glossy historical images. Nonetheless, de Miranda makes a convincing case for
+ neon as a symbol of the grand modern ambitions of the 20th century.
+
+
+ De Miranda beautifully evokes the notion of neon lighting as an icon of the 1900s in his
+ introduction: “When we hear the word neon, an image pops into our heads: a
+ combination of light, colors, symbols, and glass. This image is itself a mood. It
+ carries an atmosphere. It speaks … of the essence of cities, of the poetry of nights, of
+ the 20th century.” When neon lights debuted in Europe, they seemed dazzlingly
+ futuristic. But their husky physicality started becoming obsolete by the 1960s, thanks
+ in part to the widespread use of plastic for fluorescent signs. Neon signs exist today,
+ though they’ve been eclipsed by newer technologies such as digital billboards, and they
+ remain charmingly analog: Signs must be made by hand because there’s no cost-effective
+ way to mass-produce them.
+
+
+ In the 1910s, neon started being used for cosmopolitan flash in Paris at precisely the
+ time and place where the first great modernist works were being created. De Miranda’s
+ recounting of the ingenuity emerging from the French capital a century ago is thrilling
+ to contemplate: the cubist art of Pablo Picasso, the radically deconstructed fashions of
+ Coco Chanel, the stream-of-consciousness poetry of Gertrude Stein, and the genre-defying
+ music of Claude Debussy—all of which heralded a new age of culture for Europe and for
+ the world.
+
+ Amid this artistic groundswell, Georges Claude premiered his neon lights at the Paris Motor Show in
+ December 1910, captivating visitors with 40-foot-tall tubes affixed to the building’s
+ exterior. The lights shone orange-red because neon, by itself, produces that color.
+ Neon lighting is a catchall term that describes the technology of glass tubing
+ that contains gas or chemicals that glow when electrified. For example, neon fabricators
+ use carbon dioxide to make white, and mercury to make blue. Claude acknowledged at the
+ time that neon didn’t produce the ideal color for a standard light bulb and insisted
+ that it posed no commercial threat to incandescent bulbs.
+
+
+ Of course, the very quality that made neon fixtures a poor choice for interior lighting
+ made them perfect for signs, de Miranda notes. The first of the neon signs was switched
+ on in 1912, advertising a barbershop on Paris’s Boulevard Montmartre, and eventually
+ they were adopted by cinemas and nightclubs. While Claude had a monopoly on neon
+ lighting throughout the 1920s, the leaking of trade secrets and the expiration of a
+ series of patents broke his hold on the rapidly expanding technology.
+
+ In the following decades, neon’s nonstop glow and vibrant colors turned ordinary
+ buildings and surfaces into 24/7 billboards for businesses, large and small, that wanted
+ to convey a sense of always being open. The first examples of neon in the United States
+ debuted in Los Angeles, where the Packard Motor Car Company commissioned two large
+ blue-and-orange Packard signs that literally stopped
+ traffic because they distracted motorists. The lighting also featured heavily at the
+ Chicago Century of Progress Exposition in 1933 and at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York.
+ At the latter event, a massive neon sign reading Futurama
+ lit the way to a General Motors exhibition that heralded “The World of Tomorrow.”
+
+
+ Workers remove a hammer and sickle from a neon sign that reads “Glory to Communism,”
+ visible on the roof of the Communist-run electricity-board headquarters in
+ Czechoslovakia in 1989. (AP)
+
+ De Miranda points out that businesses weren’t alone in embracing neon’s ability to
+ spread messages effectively. By the middle of the century, the lighting was being
+ adopted for more political purposes. “In the 1960s, the Soviets deployed a vast
+ ‘neonization’ of the Eastern bloc capitals to emulate capitalist metropolises,” de
+ Miranda writes. “Because consumer shops were rare in the Polish capital [of Warsaw],
+ they did not hesitate to illuminate the façades of public buildings.” In other words, as
+ opposed to the sole use of the more obvious forms of propaganda via posters or slogans,
+ the mass introduction of neon lighting was a way of getting citizens of Communist cities
+ to see their surroundings with the pizzazz and nighttime glamour of major Western
+ capitals.
+
+ Neon, around this time, began to be phased out, thanks to cheaper and less
+ labor-intensive alternatives. In addition, the global economic downturn of the 1970s
+ yielded a landscape in which older, flickering neon signs, which perhaps their owners
+ couldn’t afford to fix or replace, came to look like symbols of decline. Where such
+ signs were once sophisticated and novel, they now seemed dated and even seedy.
+
+
+ Cities are changing fast. Keep up with the CityLab Daily newsletter.
+
+
+ De Miranda understands this evolution by zooming out and looking at the 1900s as the
+ “neon century.” The author draws a parallel between the physical form of neon lights,
+ which again are essentially containers for electrified gases, and that of a glass
+ capsule—suggesting they are a kind of message in a bottle from a time before the First
+ World War. “Since then, [neon lights] have witnessed all the transformations that have
+ created the world we live in,” de Miranda writes. “Today, they sometimes seem to
+ maintain a hybrid status, somewhere between junkyards and museums, not unlike European
+ capitals themselves.”
+
+
+ Martin Wartman, a student at Northern Kentucky University, works on a neon sign at
+ the Neonworks of Cincinnati workshop connected to the American Sign Museum, in 2016.
+ (John Minchillo / AP)
+
+ Another mark of neon’s hybridity: Its obsolescence started just as some contemporary
+ artists began using the lights in their sculptures. Bruce Nauman’s 1968 work My
+ Name as Though It Were Written on the Surface of the Moon poked fun at
+ the space race—another symbol of 20th-century technological innovation whose moment has
+ passed. The piece uses blue “neon” letters (mercury, actually) to spell out the name
+ “bruce” in lowercase cursive, with each character repeated several times as if to convey
+ a person speaking slowly in outer space. The British artist Tracey Emin has made sculptures
+ that resemble neon Valentine’s Day candies: They read as garish and sentimental
+ confections with pink, heart-shaped frames that surround blue text fragments. Drawing on
+ the nostalgia-inducing quality of neon, the sculptures’ messages are redolent of
+ old-fashioned movie dialogue, with titles such as “You Loved Me Like a Distant Star” and
+ “The Kiss Was Beautiful.”
+
+
+ Seeing neon lighting tamed in the context of a gallery display fits comfortably with de
+ Miranda’s notion that neon technology is like a time capsule from another age. In
+ museums, works of neon art and design coexist with objects that were ahead of their own
+ time in years past—a poignant fate for a technology that made its name advertising “The
+ World of Tomorrow.” Yet today neon is also experiencing a kind of craft revival. The
+ fact that it can’t be mass-produced has made its fabrication something akin to a
+ cherished artisanal technique. Bars and restaurants hire firms such as Let There Be Neon
+ in Manhattan, or the L.A.-based master
+ neon artist Lisa Schulte, to create custom signs and works of art. Neon’s story
+ even continues to glow from inside museums such as California’s Museum of Neon Art and the Neon Museum in Las
+ Vegas. If it can still be a vital medium for artists and designers working today,
+ “neonness” need not only be trapped in the past. It might also capture the mysterious
+ glow of the near future—just as it did a century ago.
+
+ In the summer of 1898, the Scottish chemist Sir William Ramsay made a discovery that
+ would eventually give the Moulin Rouge in Paris, the Las Vegas Strip, and New York’s
+ Times Square their perpetual nighttime glow. Using the boiling point of argon as a
+ reference point, Ramsay and his colleague Morris W. Travers isolated three more noble
+ gases and gave them evocative Greek names: neon, krypton, and xenon. In so doing, the
+ scientists bestowed a label of permanent novelty on the most famous of the trio—neon,
+ which translates as “new.” This discovery was the foundation on which the French
+ engineer Georges Claude crafted a new form of illumination over the next decade. He
+ designed glass tubes in which neon gas could be trapped, then electrified, to create a
+ light that glowed reliably for more than 1,000 hours.
+
+
+ In the 2012 book L’être et le Néon, which
+ has been newly translated into English by Michael Wells, the philosopher Luis de
+ Miranda weaves a history of neon lighting as both artifact and metaphor. Being and
+ Neonness, as the book is called in its English edition, isn’t a typical
+ material history. There are no photographs. Even de Miranda’s own example of a neon deli
+ sign spotted in Paris is re-created typographically, with text in all caps and dashes
+ forming the border of the sign, as one might attempt on Twitter. Fans of Miami Beach’s
+ restored Art Deco hotels and California’s bowling alleys might be disappointed by the
+ lack of glossy historical images. Nonetheless, de Miranda makes a convincing case for
+ neon as a symbol of the grand modern ambitions of the 20th century.
+
+
+
+ De Miranda beautifully evokes the notion of neon lighting as an icon of the 1900s in his
+ introduction: “When we hear the word neon, an image pops into our heads: a
+ combination of light, colors, symbols, and glass. This image is itself a mood. It
+ carries an atmosphere. It speaks … of the essence of cities, of the poetry of nights, of
+ the 20th century.” When neon lights debuted in Europe, they seemed dazzlingly
+ futuristic. But their husky physicality started becoming obsolete by the 1960s, thanks
+ in part to the widespread use of plastic for fluorescent signs. Neon signs exist today,
+ though they’ve been eclipsed by newer technologies such as digital billboards, and they
+ remain charmingly analog: Signs must be made by hand because there’s no cost-effective
+ way to mass-produce them.
+
+
+ In the 1910s, neon started being used for cosmopolitan flash in Paris at precisely the
+ time and place where the first great modernist works were being created. De Miranda’s
+ recounting of the ingenuity emerging from the French capital a century ago is thrilling
+ to contemplate: the cubist art of Pablo Picasso, the radically deconstructed fashions of
+ Coco Chanel, the stream-of-consciousness poetry of Gertrude Stein, and the genre-defying
+ music of Claude Debussy—all of which heralded a new age of culture for Europe and for
+ the world.
+
+
+
+
+
+ Amid this artistic groundswell, Georges Claude premiered his neon lights at the Paris Motor Show in
+ December 1910, captivating visitors with 40-foot-tall tubes affixed to the building’s
+ exterior. The lights shone orange-red because neon, by itself, produces that color.
+ Neon lighting is a catchall term that describes the technology of glass tubing
+ that contains gas or chemicals that glow when electrified. For example, neon fabricators
+ use carbon dioxide to make white, and mercury to make blue. Claude acknowledged at the
+ time that neon didn’t produce the ideal color for a standard light bulb and insisted
+ that it posed no commercial threat to incandescent bulbs.
+
+
+ Of course, the very quality that made neon fixtures a poor choice for interior lighting
+ made them perfect for signs, de Miranda notes. The first of the neon signs was switched
+ on in 1912, advertising a barbershop on Paris’s Boulevard Montmartre, and eventually
+ they were adopted by cinemas and nightclubs. While Claude had a monopoly on neon
+ lighting throughout the 1920s, the leaking of trade secrets and the expiration of a
+ series of patents broke his hold on the rapidly expanding technology.
+
+
+
+
+
+ In the following decades, neon’s nonstop glow and vibrant colors turned ordinary
+ buildings and surfaces into 24/7 billboards for businesses, large and small, that wanted
+ to convey a sense of always being open. The first examples of neon in the United States
+ debuted in Los Angeles, where the Packard Motor Car Company commissioned two large
+ blue-and-orange Packard signs that literally stopped
+ traffic because they distracted motorists. The lighting also featured heavily at the
+ Chicago Century of Progress Exposition in 1933 and at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York.
+ At the latter event, a massive neon sign reading Futurama
+ lit the way to a General Motors exhibition that heralded “The World of Tomorrow.”
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ Workers remove a hammer and sickle from a neon sign that reads “Glory to Communism,”
+ visible on the roof of the Communist-run electricity-board headquarters in
+ Czechoslovakia in 1989. (AP)
+
+
+
+ De Miranda points out that businesses weren’t alone in embracing neon’s ability to
+ spread messages effectively. By the middle of the century, the lighting was being
+ adopted for more political purposes. “In the 1960s, the Soviets deployed a vast
+ ‘neonization’ of the Eastern bloc capitals to emulate capitalist metropolises,” de
+ Miranda writes. “Because consumer shops were rare in the Polish capital [of Warsaw],
+ they did not hesitate to illuminate the façades of public buildings.” In other words, as
+ opposed to the sole use of the more obvious forms of propaganda via posters or slogans,
+ the mass introduction of neon lighting was a way of getting citizens of Communist cities
+ to see their surroundings with the pizzazz and nighttime glamour of major Western
+ capitals.
+
+
+
+
+
+ Neon, around this time, began to be phased out, thanks to cheaper and less
+ labor-intensive alternatives. In addition, the global economic downturn of the 1970s
+ yielded a landscape in which older, flickering neon signs, which perhaps their owners
+ couldn’t afford to fix or replace, came to look like symbols of decline. Where such
+ signs were once sophisticated and novel, they now seemed dated and even seedy.
+
+
+
+ Cities are changing fast. Keep up with the CityLab Daily newsletter.
+
+
+
+
+ De Miranda understands this evolution by zooming out and looking at the 1900s as the
+ “neon century.” The author draws a parallel between the physical form of neon lights,
+ which again are essentially containers for electrified gases, and that of a glass
+ capsule—suggesting they are a kind of message in a bottle from a time before the First
+ World War. “Since then, [neon lights] have witnessed all the transformations that have
+ created the world we live in,” de Miranda writes. “Today, they sometimes seem to
+ maintain a hybrid status, somewhere between junkyards and museums, not unlike European
+ capitals themselves.”
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ Martin Wartman, a student at Northern Kentucky University, works on a neon sign at
+ the Neonworks of Cincinnati workshop connected to the American Sign Museum, in 2016.
+ (John Minchillo / AP)
+
+
+
+ Another mark of neon’s hybridity: Its obsolescence started just as some contemporary
+ artists began using the lights in their sculptures. Bruce Nauman’s 1968 work My
+ Name as Though It Were Written on the Surface of the Moon poked fun at
+ the space race—another symbol of 20th-century technological innovation whose moment has
+ passed. The piece uses blue “neon” letters (mercury, actually) to spell out the name
+ “bruce” in lowercase cursive, with each character repeated several times as if to convey
+ a person speaking slowly in outer space. The British artist Tracey Emin has made sculptures
+ that resemble neon Valentine’s Day candies: They read as garish and sentimental
+ confections with pink, heart-shaped frames that surround blue text fragments. Drawing on
+ the nostalgia-inducing quality of neon, the sculptures’ messages are redolent of
+ old-fashioned movie dialogue, with titles such as “You Loved Me Like a Distant Star” and
+ “The Kiss Was Beautiful.”
+
+
+ Seeing neon lighting tamed in the context of a gallery display fits comfortably with de
+ Miranda’s notion that neon technology is like a time capsule from another age. In
+ museums, works of neon art and design coexist with objects that were ahead of their own
+ time in years past—a poignant fate for a technology that made its name advertising “The
+ World of Tomorrow.” Yet today neon is also experiencing a kind of craft revival. The
+ fact that it can’t be mass-produced has made its fabrication something akin to a
+ cherished artisanal technique. Bars and restaurants hire firms such as Let There Be Neon
+ in Manhattan, or the L.A.-based master
+ neon artist Lisa Schulte, to create custom signs and works of art. Neon’s story
+ even continues to glow from inside museums such as California’s Museum of Neon Art and the Neon Museum in Las
+ Vegas. If it can still be a vital medium for artists and designers working today,
+ “neonness” need not only be trapped in the past. It might also capture the mysterious
+ glow of the near future—just as it did a century ago.
+
+ Innisfil, Ontario, decided to partially subsidize ride-hailing trips rather
+ than pay for a public bus system. It worked so well that now they have to
+ raise fares and cap rides.
+
+ Using technology currently in development, AC units in skyscrapers and homes
+ could get turned into machines that pull carbon dioxide out of the
+ atmosphere.
+
+ To reimagine its largest public space, the Swiss city of Lausanne organized
+ a citywide consultation and workshop that asked: Just who is the public?
+