Beb Diwan | Beb Bhar, by night

At Beb Diwan, Atelier dada develops a night-time project that builds on a transformation initiated in daylight. The daytime strategy restored the promenade’s east-west perspective, preserved its tree alignments, relocated the tourist office to give it renewed visibility, replaced fixed kiosks with mobile kiosks made from reused port containers, rescaled the dry fountain and integrated the lighting equipment into sculptural palms.

This spatial, climatic and cultural rereading is presented in the publication devoted to the daytime strategy, available through this link. It forms the foundation of the night-time composition: light conceived around Sfax’s specific uses, memories and rhythms.

A port city at the gateway to the Tunisian desert, Sfax has ways of life deeply shaped by its climate. During the hot season, public life extends mainly into the evening, when residents go out to walk, meet and seek cooler air. Light accompanies this essential period of collective life and helps reactivate an emblematic place in the city centre.

The night-time strategy brings public lighting, paths, the planted promenade, the square, the dry fountain, the ramparts and the entrances to the medina into a single composition. Five principles guide this lighting language: requalify the space through comfortable light, humanise it at the scale of its uses, characterise its identity, unify its sequences and preserve its historic, landscape and environmental qualities.

The promenade regains luminous continuity as an extension of the 100-metre route linking the Municipality to Beb Diwan. On weekday evenings, catenary-suspended lights accompany the promenade, the mobile kiosks and places to pause. Set close to the human scale, they form a warm canopy above the paths. Concealed sources and controlled optics direct light towards useful surfaces, support visual comfort and limit spill into the foliage.

During festive occasions, strings of lights are added to the catenaries, heightening the sense of celebration until the food trucks close. The promenade thus retains its everyday role as a place to walk and meet, while gaining a livelier expression when collective activity intensifies.

The roadway shares this coherence through multifunctional lighting supports. On the square side, functional lighting is carried by sculptural stainless-steel palms inspired by the vegetal archetype lining the ramparts. On the opposite side, it is integrated into the promenade’s slender chrome-finished stainless-steel catenary supports, whose surfaces reflect their surroundings until they become mirrors of the landscape. Robust and durable, these supports combine several functions, reduce the footprint of lighting points, clear sightlines and lower infrastructure, installation and maintenance costs.

Within the project area, the existing sodium functional lighting is converted to light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Colour and light level are adjusted to ensure perceptual continuity with the installations retained before and after the section. Longitudinal uniformity is subject to strict photometric control throughout the project area, giving drivers and pedestrians crossing the road a consistent perception of the carriageway. The simplified ground pattern also concentrates pedestrian movement on a single central crossing that is immediately visible and legible. The illuminance already provided by the promenade and roadway lighting is sufficient to support it, without the dedicated lighting reinforcement that each of the four peripheral crossings in the initial design would have required.

The ramparts form the project’s great nocturnal presence. A subtle wash of warm light reveals the texture, relief and irregularities of the stone. A colour temperature between 2,200 and 2,700 kelvins, to be refined through on-site testing, accompanies the natural hue of the walls and gives them gentle modelling.

Around Beb Diwan, a second layer forms a belt of sacred words from the Quran, projected in Arabic calligraphy. This writing reconnects the gate with the site’s Arab-Muslim memory and strengthens its symbolic resonance in the local imagination. When the project was presented, the proposal received an especially warm response from the project team and municipal representatives, who were moved by the meaning it restored to the monument.

Beb Bhar, the Gate of the Sea, preserves the site’s physical memory in its name. The square once occupied the shoreline beach at the foot of the fortifications. Sea-green ripples move slowly across the mineral ground while fish glide through them in a gentle, fluid motion. Alive and playful, this sea of light evokes the vanished shoreline and reconnects the square with Sfax’s maritime history. Like the calligraphic belt, it sparked immediate enthusiasm and inspired the people of Sfax to whom the project was presented.

In parallel, the dry fountain brings freshness, movement and animation. Its operation encourages playful use and cooling during hot periods. When inactive, its unobstructed footprint accommodates gatherings, fairs and events held on the square.

The sculptural stainless-steel palms bring together the equipment required for the different night-time expressions. Their silhouette gives the square a daytime identity and extends the vegetal presence lining the ramparts. Functional lighting, heritage enhancement, calligraphy and scenographic projections are integrated into these structures. The square thus retains a clear landscape, supported by a shared lighting infrastructure.

The temporal strategy assigns each layer to its purpose. Every night, public lighting accompanies the paths, promenade and roads, while warm light reveals the ramparts. As an integral part of their illumination, the calligraphy is lit every evening until midnight.

Ground projections accompany weekends, festive nights and summer evenings during the first half of the night. These periods correspond to the moments when the square hosts its most intense collective presence and unfolds a more generous luminous expression.

At midnight, the calligraphy and projections are switched off. Public lighting is reduced to 50% until dawn. On the ramparts, only the subtle wash of warm light remains, accompanying the stone. Independent circuits and dimming systems allow the scenarios to adapt to uses, seasons and the city’s calendar.

Restraint is thus inscribed in the project’s very rhythm. Everyday light supports movement and encounters. Symbolic light restores the presence of the fortifications and the gate. Festive light accompanies shared moments. Their gradual switch-off leads the square into the calm of the night.

Presented on 2 January 2025 as part of the preliminary lighting design, this night-time strategy received approval from Sfax Municipality to proceed to detailed design and tender documentation. It reconnects the different memories of the place: Beb Diwan, the Gate of the Office, and Beb Bhar, the Gate of the Sea; the ramparts and the contemporary city; the historic centre and its inhabitants. Light becomes the shared rhythm through which the square can be recognised, inhabited and celebrated.

© 2024-2025 Atelier dada / Marie-Ikram Bouhlel. Lighting concept and strategy, graphic documents, projection imagery and editorial text protected. All rights reserved. Any reproduction, adaptation, distribution or use, in whole or in part, without prior written authorisation is prohibited.