Obituary: Abe Feder

From the age of 14 to his death at 87, Abe Feder dedicated himself exclusively, obsessively, to illumination in a vast range of applications.

Feder was not only America's first modern "lighting designer" for the theatre, both experimental and Broadway, he also became the country's leading architectural and urban lighting consultant. Thus Feder's resume runs in two distinct columns: hundreds of plays, musicals and operas; and a huge number of buildings. These lists reveal an impressive chronology and grandeur: My Fair Lady (1956) can be matched by the Rockefeller Center's RCA Building, or The Cradle Will Rock (1938) with Hartford Athenaeum - a parallel history of the most important theatre productions and buildings in mid-20th- century America.

Feder was born in Milwaukee in 1909 and "blew his first fuse" on a school production, having been inspired by a visiting magician, the Great Thurston. He attended the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, where he studied architecture, which in practical effect is what he practised, albeit using electricity and candlepower rather than brick or concrete; his sensibility being always closer to that of sophisticated architect than stage hack. Indeed, considering the range of buildings he worked with, on or in, and the integrity of his solutions for everyone from Gropius to Morris Lapidus, Feder could be seen as forerunner of those theoretical architects today investigating cybertechnology, electronics and other forms of "building" without traditional materials.

As it was, while still an undergraduate Feder won praise from the French playwright Paul Claudel for the novel lighting of one of his plays and was soon working at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, moving to Manhattan in 1930. He was immediately hailed as a precocious star, at 20 the only independent lighting designer in America. His avant-garde credentials were established with Gertrude Stein's "negro opera", Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), for which he consulted skin specialists on black pigmentation, resulting in more intense light for a luminous quality.

This technique came in useful when collaborating with Orson Welles at the Federal Theater, including his "Black Macbeth" (1936). As part of the theatre's "Living Newspaper Productions" Feder utilised radical techniques of projecting colour-slides and film footage in lieu of painted sets, perhaps influencing Citizen Kane. His most important Welles production was Dr Faustus (1937), where light first shaped the stage without benefit of sets, a job of such magnitude Feder moved into the theatre to live and was afterwards hospitalised with a breakdown.

Some of this may have been occasioned by his ferociously antagonistic relationship with Welles (amusingly documented in Simon Callow's recent biography) and Feder's own short temper. Now known as "Houdini of the Switchboard", Feder became lighting and technical director of all Federal Theater productions, some 200 including landmarks such as Nazimova's Hedda Gabler (1937).

In the Second World War Serjeant Feder toured with Winged Victory and subsequent-ly lit countless Broadway shows from The Boyfriend (1953) and My Fair Lady (1956) to Camelot (1960). The latter also resulted in a ground- breaking court case awarding him $500 damages for the (unauthorised) British version of his lighting plan, an important precedent for the integrity of theatrical lighting, in the process revealing that Feder was paid almost twice Cecil Beaton's set fee.

"Theatre is the most wonderful training possible for this profession, but how can you get excited about a 50-foot stage after you've lit a 50- storey building?" Feder commented of his architectural commissions, spearheading the post-war discovery of public lighting. From the United Nations, inside St Patrick's Cathedral, to a terminal at JFK airport, the Bronx Zoo, even Buckminster Fuller's first geodesic dome, Feder was always ready to "Push back the darkness!" - Feder's slogan.

For the Rockefeller he used 50 million lumens - the approximate output of 42,000 75-watt bulbs - from 342 tightly focused lamps hidden on nine buildings to cast no shadow, lamps built to order by General Electric, including which chemicals he wanted in the vapours. For the Pan Am building he deployed 206 incandescent bulbs with pencil-like beams mounted on the surrounding roofs, proving his motto: "Lighting is the only design material that can fill space without blocking it."

In everything from the 1949 Gimbels corset department to luxury Transatlantic liners, Otto Preminger's New York residence, the gigantic Miami Lincoln Mall or brass mesh and fluorescents to simulate sunlight in his own kitchen, Feder was both technical, practical expert and abstract metaphysician. He was directly responsible for 10 different new types of lightbulbs and a column in Women's Wear Daily encouraging retail trade through lighting, but always emphasised: "Thinking in light is something essentially independent from the physical means of carrying out those ideas."

This was a man who had to turn down lighting Piazza San Marco in Venice and the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem for lack of local resources and could not eat under ugly restaurant lighting, his passion and expertise knowing no boundaries of scale or curiosity. "Lighting By Feder", the famous trademark name, carries on, and how appropriate that Abe Feder's death should have been honoured by the early extinction of the lights at both the Rockefeller Center and the Empire State Building.

Abraham Hyman Feder, lighting designer: born Milwaukee, Wisconsin 27 June 1909; twice married; died New York 24 April 1997.