Light on matter - Comment

Architectural Review, The, Feb, 2003 by Paula Deitz

Without light, the world would seem almost formless. From the first architects have reinterpreted the luminance of the heavens. Added to this awesome task is the challenge of imaginatively providing artificial illumination. Are we up to it?

'The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep ... And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good; and god divided the light from the darkness'. (1) All the peoples of the Book -- Muslims, Christians and Jews -- believe that light is the source of life and that, without light, all life will perish. (2) But light is not just an essential to existence for most species. It is an inspiration to all animate creatures -- most intensely perhaps to humans, who as far as we can understand, have celebrated the coming and the passing of the light of the day, the waning and rising of the moon, and the alternation between sunny summer and dour winter in all their religions, not just those of the Book, but since beginnings of our species. Without light, as the God of the Old Testament realized, 'the earth was without form'.

And of course, for most of us, the earth only acquires form when it is perceived in light. Of all the senses that give us a sense of form of our surroundings, the visual is the most important for most people, with the aural and haptic ones providing additional but non-essential information. Le Corbusier, as a fiery '20s polemicist, urged that 'Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light'. (3) With experience, Corb realized that our eyes and brains are made to perceive and respond to spaces as well as forms. His 1924 insistence that the primary elements of architecture are 'prisms, cubes and cylinders, pyramids or spheres' was modified in his postwar work. His perceptions of the non-Euclidean world and the importance of space matured in the mastery of Ronchamp, where an organic space, derived from its religious rituals is made almost palpable by the amazing shafts and sheets of light that penetrate the body of the churc h from its carefully organized openings.

The history of religious buildings is the history of human civilization and its relationship to light. From the Egyptians, Celts and pre-Columbian peoples, societies have built structures that celebrate light and the changes of the seasons. The Romans and Byzantines were the first people (in the West at least) to have made great public interiors (as opposed to the open-air time-measuring devices like Stonehenge or secretive enclosed ones like Egyptian temples or the ancient tombs of Ireland). Buildings like the Pantheon or Hagia Sophia were devices that introduced light to grand interiors in ways that reinforced their sacerdotal purposes. For instance the disc cast by rays of sunlight that descends to the interior of the Pantheon from the oculus in the dome (one of the most powerful images in the whole of architecture) fell successively on the images of the gods and emperors which filled the niches of the walls; the whole Roman state religion was made clear to the congregation by moving light. Similarly, in B yzantine churches, light was used dramatically to emphasize the stories of the faith and its most important annual and diurnal moments. The notion of the building as a numinous instrument was continued in descendants of Byzantine architecture as different as Gothic churches of the North and Ottoman mosques in the Middle East. Baroque churches, with their great and often awe-inspiring drama, were the last examples ofbuildings as instruments of religion.

Luminous drama

The tradition died (at least overtly) in the rationalism of the eighteenth century, when the fire of the Counter Reformation that had set the Baroque ablaze had been reduced to embers. It is no coincidence perhaps that by the beginning of the next century, gas lighting became increasingly popular, first in city streets to counter crime, then in buildings like factories so that workers could be kept at their machines far longer than they have been able to toil by the light of day. Artificial lighting, first by gas, then by electricity after Swan and then Edison invented the incandescent filament lamp in the late 1870s, (4) radically transformed humankind's relationship to nature. Electricity allowed the Industrial Revolution to explode all over the world, gradually transforming culture from being fundamentally mechanically based to today's post-modern electronic ways of living and thinking.

The enormous power given by electricity has radically transformed all our lives, not least those of architects. Without electricity, modern civilization would be impossible. Up to Baroque times architects, at least when making great public buildings, inherited the mantle of the priests of the earliest religions as interpreters of the cosmos to humanity by modifying and manipulating the light given by the Great Architect of the Universe. Universal, reliable and even human-made light, completely independent of diurnal rhythm, has abolished the shamanist aspects of our calling.