Light Revealing Architecture

Justin McNair

The Myriad Relations between Light and Context

The perception of light and shadow is a primal experience for human kind. It is the basis for our visual environment and frames our psychological tendencies. I used to believe that to be a ‘good’ designer one ‘just’ had to be creative, edgy, and understand how to build on current trends but there is way more elements involved in the process of a designer.

What I’ve gathered from the reading is that Light has a set of variable but repetitive conditions based predominantly on location (place). In general, light changes through day and season but always comes back to revisit the same conditions next year, next season, and the next day. Due to this ritual, light creates an identity just as much as places remind us of home or smells evoke memories but it is an ethereal, inanimate identity. In this way, light not only effects our interiors; it affects our attitudes, our cultural rituals, and our social status. For example, in western suburban homes we have ‘decorative’ shudders that are hardly even noticed because temperate weather conditions, blinds, and mechanical heating allow us to live comfortably without needing shudders and therefore become a superfluous design element. However, in Italy, a warmer climate and local traditions allow and dictate the use of three layers of shutters to control natural ventilation and light. This is a condition where both place and culture determine the control of light and its identity.

Adjacent to this notion of light identity, I have coined my own term called ‘cultural light’: the way light creates relationships with people between geographies that distinguish separate philosophies on how light is handled in these separate environments. This relationship between light and culture is impacted heavily by climate. The reading discussed the different perceptions of light in Western and Eastern cultures and this was definitely affected by climate conditions, the resources to control that climate, and differing philosophies. For example, I believe that Westerners compare light with clarity, vision, equality, and freedom in both the figurative and literal sense; we admire these qualities in our culture so we strive to emulate our beliefs and therefore maximize light sources. Where as, in my limited understanding, Easterners strive for simplicity and what is necessary and comfortable in life, not because they are simple people but because they find beauty and reason in simplicity. In this manner, light is a facet of life that doesn’t necessarily hold symbolic virtue but is an element of function and since they strive to stay balanced they focus on the shadows produced by light.

Time is light’s compass and prison because time is an invention of man’s need to create organization. In this regard, time makes light predictable and repetitive, allowing us to manipulate the spectrum and intensity of light if we understand the beat of time. This is evident even in ancient societies with landmark sundials like Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids of Giza. These dials became methods of control and permanence, they allowed civilizations to coordinate and grow. In modern times, I think we undermine the sway time has on light. Instead we focus on ‘modern’ solutions, what technology offers because it is man-made versus nature. It feeds our own genius and ego so we look to new solutions to what could be solved with primordial elements. However, there are those few buildings that transcend beyond function and become sundials themselves. A great archetype comes from the classical world in the rotunda of the Pantheon. This building provided more than just the function for worship, it contained the whole universe through the eye in the dome, cascading focal light with the pattern of day until it came full circle. In this regard, Time allows us to see light as a changing variable but on the same token as a permanent entity never leaving but always shifting form.

While light has subtle variations that go obliviously unnoticed, our true recollection of light occurs only when we have drastic fluctuations where there is either too much or too little, and this is where the task falls into place. Our ability to be able to preform task is, to my knowledge, the only reason we care about light, for if we were bats we would little depend on the quality of light. The relationship between light and task is one that would seem the most variable for human conditions. There are countless functions and conditions that apply to our needs many within the same room. We need to consider what time we occupy these rooms or spaces, what functions occur at what time, how long we spend there, and multiple other possibilities in order to be able to manipulate the light for the task. This is where the advent of electric lighting allowed us to improve task lighting. A great example of myriad relationships between light and the task are seen in the complex lighting schemes of restaurants. For instance, there is a vast ambient source of electric task lighting in the kitchen and in pod areas for staff, red tinted, dim over head lighting for booths and tables to create a warm, private atmosphere without making the food look cold, recess and hidden lighting at the bar to evenly distribute light without the glare, even shiny or metallic surfaces to refract light to improve light volume. All these minute considerations must be handled in order to produce a comfortable environment, and they begin with the foundation of light and function.

Light is such a multi contextual realm that it is hard to pin point and perfect it’s subtleties in every given situation. In order to truly understand light you can not separate it from each relationship it identifies with because light is constantly connected to time, place, culture, and task. However, the basis of knowledge is learning from the individual process, for one can not understand the universal without first breaking down the individual, just like polymers break down into monomers and build themselves back up to something the body can use so our mind needs to take information in incremental steps to understand the big picture.