Aichi Nagoya Art & Lights

Aichi Nagoya Art & Lights projects digital art and illumination onto the facades of the Aichi Prefectural Government Office and Nagoya City Hall – and the buildings themselves are half the appeal.

Standing side by side near Nagoya Castle, both are designated Important Cultural Properties and rare survivors of a distinctive 1930s style. Each pairs a modern Western-style concrete body with a Japanese castle-style roof on top – an idiosyncratic hybrid known as teikan-yoshiki, or "imperial crown style”. Designed to harmonise with the castle nearby, they form the only place in Japan where two such buildings stand together. The Prefectural Office is the more castle-like of the pair, its upper walls clad in pale ceramic tile evoking Nagoya Castle's white plaster – a nod, too, to Aichi's long history as a pottery-producing region.

The event turns those frontages into a stage. Under the theme "Aichi-Nagoya Grand Spectrum”, a program combining projection-mapped digital art and architectural lighting plays across the west sides of both buildings, in alternating five-minute segments running back to back through the evening.