Son et lumiere began at the chateau of Chambord in 1952: floodlights, speakers, and a scripted night drama played across the facade. The format spread to heritage sites worldwide, the pyramids of Giza most famously, institutionalizing architecture as a performance surface.
Technically the shows pioneered large-scale synchronized playback control, the ancestor of today’s timecoded media-server productions, and their modern descendants are full projection-mapped spectacles on the same monuments.
The genre’s lesson for all environmental visuals: buildings carry narrative weight, and light applied to place borrows that weight automatically.