Philosophy of Light

The American Association of the Blind states that 87% of all sense perception comes through our eyes, and the National Society for the Prevention of Blindness concurs. Though architectural work is done to control nature, 87% of the impact of our architecture is due to the way we see it. Architectural forms, their material, scale, proportion, color, decoration, and even our feeling of their durability and stability, are revealed to us mostly through our eyes according to how they accidentally appear or are planned to appear. In front of the mind’s eye are three elements in the perception of visual design – three elemental kinds of light effect which can be related to the art of painting for easier visualization: 1) focal glow or highlight, 2) ambient luminescence or graded wash, and 3) the play of brilliants or sharp detail. These three elements are also the order of imaginative planning.

Focal Glow

is the campfire of all time. It is also the celebrated limelight of aphorism, because of the early English music halls and their use of antiquated projectors which burned a gas resulting from wetting a kind of lime. Focal glow is the “follow spot” on the modern stage, it is the pool of light on your favorite reading chair, the shaft of sunlight that warms the far end of the valley, candlelight on a face or a flashlight’s beam. Focal glow draws attention, pulls together diverse parts, sells merchandise, separates the important from the unimportant, helps people see. Focal glow sometimes becomes multiple foci desirably producing a significant composition of attention. As the number of foci increases in more complex compositions, a pattern results which can continue and come to resemble the second element of light, ambient luminescence.

“Space is nothing until interrupted. Light is invisible until interrupted by a surface, line, or point, thus made visible.” —Richard Kelly

Ambient Luminescence

is the uninterrupted light of a snowy morning in the open country, fog light at sea in a small boat, twilight haze on a river where shore and water and sky are indistinguishable. The show lighting in a dome amphitheater, the full cyclorama of the open theater, an art gallery with strip-lighted walls, translucent ceiling and white floor. It is also all we know of indirect lighting. Ambient luminescence produces shadowless illumination. It minimizes form and bulk and consequently the importance of all things and people. It suggests the freedom of space and tends to suggest infinity which is usually reassuring, quiets the nerves and is restful.

Play of Brilliants

is Times Square at night, an eighteenth-century ballroom with a crystal chandelier of many candle lamps. It is sunlight on a fountain or brook, a cache of diamonds in an open cave, the rose window at Chartres Cathedral, night automobiles at a busy clover-leaf, a city at night from the air, the trees outside your window interlaced with the beams of a spotlight or a shaft of sunlight, a sparkling cabinet of glassware. Play of brilliants excites the optic nerve and in turn stimulates the body and spirit, quickens the appetite, awakens curiosity, sharpens the wit, and is distracting or entertaining as it is used and desired.