Light

What is represented in a picture is what is visible to the eye, it is the thing or the things that had to be thought of. Thus, what is represented in the picture are the things I thought of, to be precise, a nocturnal landscape and a skyscape such as can be seen in broad daylight. The landscape suggests night and the skyscape day. This evocation of night and day seems to me to have the power to surprise and delight us. I call this power: poetry

Raking sunlight is a fantastic way to get information about a facade. Any out-of-plane geometry is immediately visible as a shadow. You can see the natural irregularity of a brick wall...and a bulge that might indicate steel damage.

I have on occasion waited around longer than I care to admit for the sun to get to the position necessary to rake the facade.

There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.

On April 8, the sun, moon and Earth will enter the precise alignment of a total solar eclipse. The moon will block the sun, casting a shadow across a strip of North America from the Pacific Ocean west of Mexico, through 15 U.S. states, to the Atlantic off Canada.

This strip, roughly 4,000 miles long and 115 miles wide, is called the path of totality.

The building is formally divided in half, with one side dark, the other light. Inside, transparent scrim walls are stretched taut from floor to ceiling in black or white respectively, bisecting each long wing and capturing the always-changing natural light. The connecting corridor has a progression of scrim walls that sequentially cross and fill the space, with an enfilade of doors for passage.

I recently made a physical object that defies all intuition. It's a square of acrylic, smooth on both sides, totally transparent. A tiny window.

But it has the magic property that if you shine a flashlight on it, it forms an image.

Irwin has explained that he decided to use the fluorescent tubes in the "dumbest" way possible, but, as one critic cautioned, "dumb, it turns out, has a special meaning for him: It's a form so simple that you end up not paying attention to it as a form." Irwin's interest was, rather, in the range of light, color, reflection, and shadow interaction made possible by combining tubes with different hues and finishes by wrapping them with theatrical gels.

I sculpt using both light and shadow. I construct single or multiple objects and place them in relation to a single light source. The complete artwork is therefore comprised of both the material (the solid objects) and the immaterial (the light or shadow).

The house’s structure is divided into two main volumes connected by a corridor, framing the courtyard and the jacaranda tree. The front volume houses the service areas and bedrooms, while the rear volume contains the living room, dining area, and the indoor swimming pool.

Pictures have always been a meaningful part of the human experience. From the first cave drawings, to sketches and paintings, to modern photography, we’ve mastered the art of recording what we see.

Cameras and the lenses inside them may seem a little mystifying. In this blog post I’d like to explain not only how they work, but also how adjusting a few tunable parameters can produce fairly different results.

Evoked by light
White is a tint
Displayed on the left, otherwise
very close
the collection includes simple matter
There is no evidence outside
there are tones that are common
Displayed on the left of one
Champagne as representation
White is one, an exact year
Coordinates are not known

And if your broken heart's heavy when you step on the scale,
You'll be lighter than air when they pull back the veil.
Consider the flowers: they don't try to look right;
They just open their petals and turn to the light.

Problem

When they have a choice, people will always gravitate to those rooms which have light on two sides, and leave the rooms which are lit only from one side unused and empty.

Solution

Locate each room so that it has outdoor space outside it on at least two sides, and then place windows in these outdoor walls so that natural light falls into every room from more than one direction.

That’s 21 (left) and 20 West Street, with 17 Battery Place off to the right. This was taken early in the morning and the facades facing me are the west facades of the buildings. Across West Street, to my right, is a modern apartment house with a mostly-glass facade. It doesn’t matter how well-built that facade is, the glass panels are not perfectly aligned and are not perfectly flat. So when the low-angle sunlight hits the glass and reflects back across the street, you get that wavy/dappled effect. It’s quite pretty from the street, but I expect it’s a bit annoying if you’re in an apartment in one of those two buildings trying to stay asleep in bed and you’ve got this underwater effect light coming in the windows.

Problem

Uniform illumination—the sweetheart of the lighting engineers—serves no useful purpose whatsoever. In fact, it destroys the social nature of space, and makes people feel disoriented and unbounded.

Solution

Place the lights low, and apart, to form individual pools of light which encompass chairs and tables like bubbles to reinforce the social character of the spaces which they form. Remember that you can’t have pools of light without the darker places in between.

In addition to managing the flow of people in the spaces of the museum in order to maximize freedom of movement and choice, Irwin also modified the industrial window grids to create perceptual ambiguity, placing transparent glass in the inner four panes while using frosted glass for the outer panes. With this, Irwin solved the problem of either having the windows become a wall of glaring light, if all transparent glass was used, or having them become a claustrophobic muffling of space, if all frosted glass was used. Irwin's windows catch the eye in a back and forth oscillation between distant and proximal focus.

Komorebi is a Japanese word that means sunlight filtering through the foliage. It’s much more than a technical description, it’s a feeling. It’s the emotions you experience from the shimmering light and dancing shadows created by the swaying of leaves in the wind. You often find komorebi under the canopy of a forest, especially in the early morning or late evening “golden hour” light.

...As I watched Perfect Days, I found myself relating to Hirayama, the main character. He is drawn to that komorebi feeling of the light coming through the trees, and tries to photographically capture it. I oftentimes do that, although not usually with a lot of success. I don’t believe I realized that it’s a certain emotional response that I attempted to capture in those moments, or especially how difficult it is to communicate that feeling photographically. That’s the job of the photographer; however, it’s not an easy job, at least not for me. It’s one thing to capture the scene as I see it, but another to capture it as I feel it. Hopefully, the more I practice and the more I learn the better at it I will become. Photography is a life-long pursuit.

Yamamoto Sanehiko, president of the Kaizo publishing house, told me of something that happened when he escorted Dr. Einstein on a trip to Kyoto. As the train neared Ishiyama, Einstein looked out the window and remarked, "Now that is terribly wasteful." When asked what he meant, Einstein pointed to an electric lamp burning in broad daylight.

And the truth of the matter is that Japan wastes more electric light than any Western country except America.

When people say that white walls are cold and characterless, I wonder whether they have ever stopped to look at one. It's not just about the drama of light and shadow, although I love the fragment of the ghost chair in this picture, but the way the smallest nuances of texture and tone come alive in certain conditions.

For others, perhaps especially those artists who worked with light and transparency and were involved in the birth of the Light and Space Movement, an immaculate surface is a prerequisite. Helen Pashgian explained this very clearly:

“On any of these works, if there is a scratch... that’s all you see. The point of it is not the finish at all – the point is being able to interact with the piece, whether it is inside or outside, to see into it, to see through it, to relate to it in those ways. But that’s why we need to deal with the finish, so we can deal with the piece on a much deeper level”.

The importance of a pristine surface calls for a very low tolerance to damage by the artists. The feeling is shared by Larry Bell:

“I don’t want you to see stains on the glass. I don’t want you to see fingerprints on the glass... I don’t want you to see anything except the light that’s reflected, absorbed, or transmitted”

If you are there at sunset, as are the scientists every day, you see the most magical of transformations: the golden glow that fills the sky to the west is first reflected in the water of the ocean and then shoots like a line of fire up through the gathering darkness of the plaza's stone floor, to reach its source in the cubic fountain. The court is breathtaking in its sublime power, opening at the edge of the continent to the Pacific Ocean and framing the light blue-on-dark-blue horizon line of the sea and sky.

This map shows all the blinking beacons from OpenStreetMap.

More specifically, it asks the Overpass API for all elements with an seamark:light:sequence or seamark:light:1:sequence attribute, decodes these, and displays them as coloured circles on the map using Leaflet. It also tries to take the seamark:light:range and seamark:light:colour into account.

I was recently fortunate enough to find myself in the pub with some very creative and talented people. The discussion turned to electronic candles, and how one might create something that would look like a flickering candle from any angle. I suggested a persistence-of-vision display, but the general consensus was that those require too much in the way of supporting machinery to make them work: bearings, and probably slip rings and so on.
Afterwards I had a think and figured that if the motor and battery were small enough, the whole thing could spin.

In certain conditions, the white walls at home take on the character of a light box. In traditional Japanese architecture the intensity of atmosphere has a lot to do with the way natural light is filtered through the shoji paper panels, suffusing the interior spaces with subdued light, calming the spirit and sharpening the senses.

Daylight should not tyrannize architecture. As with so many aspects of the design of the city, light is something that should be available in a variety of modulations and susceptible to a variety of controls. However, the prejudice must always be for access.

Penetrating the Blue Cliff,
you will open the eye within eyes,
and realizing life through the Blue Cliff,
you yourself will become a torch,
the light beyond light.

Being so, you will find no door at which to knock,
nor any door to be opened.

Searle: In psych tests on deep space, I ran a number of sensory deprivation trials, tested in total darkness, on floatation tanks - and the point about darkness is, you float in it. You and the darkness are distinct from each other because darkness is an absence of something, it's a vacuum. But total light envelops you. It becomes you.

In today's architectural practice, light is regrettably often treated merely as a quantitative phenomenon; design regulations and standards specify required minimum level of illumination and window sizes, but they do not define any maximum levels of luminance, or desired qualities of light, such as its orientation, temperature, color, or reflectedness.

My media isn’t glass, it’s the light that hits that glass.

Darkness cannot say: “I precede the coming light”, but there is a sense in which light can say, “Darkness preceded me”.

Doubtless there is an event, X, in the future, by reference to which we may say that we are at present in a category of Not-X, but until X occurs, the category of Not-X is without reality. Only X can give reality to Not-X; that is to say, Not-Being depends for its reality upon Being. In this way we may faintly see how the creation of Time may be said automatically to create a time when Time was not, and how the Being of God can be said to create a Not-Being that is not God.

Le Corbusier, the greatest architect of the last century, noted that 'architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in light', demonstrating to what extent light has been prioritized in the Western tradition. Tanizaki, on the other hand, spoke of the important of shadows, of extended eaves. Rather than the light that shines directly into a room, he praised the soft light that penetrates a space after being reflected off the floor, and again from the ceiling.

...In Japanese architecture, the gentle light that passes through shoji screens serves a key purpose. It reaches right to the back of the room, so that the space feels bright, even without the aid of artificial light. The soft light filtering through the white film at Takanawa Gateway Station represents a form of light that was forgotten about by Japanese Modernism.

Problem

In a building with uniform light level, there are few “places” which function as effective settings for human events. This happens because, to a large extent, the places which make effective settings are defined by light.

Solution

Create alternating areas of light and dark throughout the building, in such a way that people naturally walk toward the light, whenever they are going to important places: seats, entrances, stairs, passages, places of special beauty, and make other areas darker, to increase the contrast.

Despite the fact that there are not many documented cases of sudden mysterious darkness, scientists are seriously concerned about this phenomenon. The phenomenon was first mentioned in the Bible. It spoke of darkness as a punishment of the gods sent to the Egyptians.

The most famous, which has already become a textbook, can be considered a case in the American city of Louisville. On March 7, 1911, at about 4 pm, darkness fell on the city, which lasted for about an hour.

Although, as eyewitnesses later told, it seemed to them that they had been in thick, viscous darkness for only a few minutes. The darkness was so dense that a lit match brought to their faces could not be seen. Fear paralyzed people, they stood still, afraid to get lost.

1. Generally speaking, SINGLE-COLOR interiors are a true delight; WE SHALL EXAMINE WHY THEY CAN WORK and WHY POO-BEIGE IS A (CURRENT) EXCEPTION
2. Particularly speaking, we shall investigate THE COLOR RED, for the reason that it has the LONGEST WAVELENGTH OF HUMAN-VISIBLE LIGHT i.e. expends the least energy in getting places, which is an approach to existence we currently APPRECIATE

The returns from an activity or enterprise do not warrant the time, money or effort required. This expression, which began as a translation of a term used by the French essayist Michel de Montaigne in 1580, alludes to gambling by candlelight, which involved the expense of illumination. If the winnings were not sufficient, they did not warrant the expense.

If you look for the light,
you can often find it.
But if you look for the dark,
that is all you will ever see.

— Uncle Iroh

In between these two extremes is a room with three constructions by Robert Irwin. These can be read as individual works of art but their function here is primarily that of creating a climate of fastidious ambiguity. Light turns into a new kind of material; new kinds of material are fused into light; a vaporous middle-world stands midway between total black (Bell) and total white (Wheeler)

It seems gadget creators won’t be satisfied until they’ve turned every house into a rubbish sci-fi set with eerie neon glows. But no product should need to blast a laser-beam-like light into your retinas, just to point out that it is functional.

Assuming it does even that. Because, really, who knows what each light is actually for? It might mean something is on. Or off. It might show that it’s charged. Or charging. Or maybe it’s just there to announce the gadget‘s existence, because the design team had a budget to play with and a corporate ego to stroke.

I could not know that even then the little light was being drawn irresistibly into the great soundless whirl of darkness and that I was watching a light that was destined soon to blink out and disappear.

For those who've never experienced a sunrise in the rural Midwest, it's roughly as soft and romantic as someone's abruptly hitting the lights in a dark room. This is because the land is so flat that there is nothing to impede or gradualize the sun's appearance. It's just all of a sudden there.

Like a forest or a garden or a field, an honest page of letters can absorb – and will repay – all the attention it is given. Much type now, however, is delivered to computer screens. It is a good deal harder to make text truly legible on screen than to render streaming video. Both fine technology and great restraint are required to make the screen as restful to the eyes as ordinary paper.

The underlying problem is that the screen mimics the sky instead of the earth. It bombards the eye with light instead of waiting to repay the gift of vision – like the petals of a flower, or the face of a thinking animal, or a well-made typographic page. And we read the screen the way we read the sky: in quick sweeps, guessing at the weather from the changing shapes of clouds, or in magnified small bits, like astronomers studying details. We look to it for clues and revelations more than wisdom. This makes it an attractive place for the open storage of pulverized information – names, dates, or library call numbers, for instance – but not so good a place for thoughtful text.

How much more mysterious and inviting is the street of an old town with its alternating realms of darkness and light than are the brightly and evenly lit streets of today! Homogenous bright light paralyzes the imagination in the same way that homogenization of space weakens the experience of being, and wipes away the sense of place. The human eye is most perfectly tuned for twilight rather than bright daylight.

Street lights can be like that famous stone that falls in the desert where there are no ears to hear. Does it make a noise? Without effective eyes to see, does a light cast light? Not for practical purposes.

And here we come back to that forgotten, outcast word, the soul.

Indeed, the soul possesses an inner light, the light that an inner vision knows and expresses in the world of brilliant colors, in the world of sunlight.

"If what one finds is made of pure matter, it will never spoil. And one can always come back. If what you had found was only a moment of light, like the explosion of a star, you would find nothing on your return."

And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy. But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer – by demonstration – would take care of that, too.

For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program.

The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.

And AC said, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!"

And there was light.