Bright neon lights dazzling the night sky, illuminated buildings, streets and monuments add a stroke of glamour, excitement and adventure to a nocturnal urban landscape. Have you ever considered about the origins and evolution of ‘neon cities’, which we now expect in any town beckoning an after dark audience? 

The name Joseph Urban may not be the most recognizable of names, and may only spring to the mind’s of the most knowledgeable of the history of art and design. But in the 1930s, the architect and interior designer was so notorious and celebrated that when he was dying of cancer in a New York hotel, he checked in under a different name to prevent stalkers and gossips from disturbing him on his deathbed.   

Designed to transport Joseph Urban’s significant influence to the world of art and design back to its former glory and reignite enthusiasm towards the artist, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University is exhibiting a display of the Vienna-born artist’s most prolific pieces.

The exhibition contains 152 items portraying Joseph Urban’s highly varied and influential artistic genius. Nightclubs were a particularly significant feature of the artist’s talents, which included designing Art Nouveau nightclubs in Europe in the 1890s, to running neon tubes along Ziggurat buildings at the Century of Progress World Fair in Chicago in 1933.

Similar to the extroverted, unreserved, frivolous and larger-than-life vibes neon lights create, which help allure punters through a building’s doors, according to John Loring, the former design director at Tiffany & Company, Joseph Urban was a “large, jocular, sybaritic, fun-loving extrovert, who enjoyed caviar and champagne.”

Sadly, similar to how Joseph Urban’s impact on the world of architecture and design seemingly vanished from the mainstream pubic sphere of art history and was replaced by a more ‘underground’ position, only a handful of the buildings and rooms Urban designed have survived, including the stuccoed Mar a Lago Club in Palm Beach.

The Urban Retrospective exhibition will be shown at Columbia’s Rare Book Library until mid-December 2010.