The gates at night exist in a different landscape from the gates at day. The gates at day live in the wooded meanders of Central Park, describing the topology of the park personalised as Christo's and Jean Claude's. It is their park that we are walking in, it is still the public space it was before but we now feel their routes through the space, the time that they have accrued manifesting itself with these flags. The space is different from the city around it, it is different from the park's space, it is different from the sky it lies beneath.

The gates at night belong to the city. They belong to the urban space that encloses the park more than the park itself. The park loses presence except at its boundaries where the typical gridded lights of the city impose themselves. The mass of the buildings diminishes the heraldic effect forcing the viewer to examing not the 2D topology landscape but the full force of the air and height of a city. The gates performed its trick by finding a vertical element in a rolling landscape. The landscape obviously has a mass to it, but it is a thin mass, like paper. Christo's flag popped out from that land asserting themselves, and showing the viewer a form of extended sight, much as a standard bearer would have done in old battles, proving a conquered or held position in a battlefield.



In this way the gates at night are defeated but gain elsewhere. There is a new palette, the trees glow silver grey or orange depending upon the light and the spaces open or close based upon the monofilament or halogen source. The orange lights compress the space and bring the land, tarmac and trees in close alignment to the orange of the gates whilst the blue lights open up a space based upon hue where snow is pared with silvered trees and leave a new aesthetic against the orange spaces. The gates at day are unified and continuous; the gates at night have broken allegiance to different colours. The citynightscape lobbies for one sort of gate; the moonlight associates with the snow. The politics of colour and light assert themselves and unlike the gates at day where the purity of distinction that the orange has in the greys and browns of Central Park is lost in the similar orange of artificial light. The gates are reclaimed as part of the city.