LIGHT + ARCHITECTURE_Essay | Philosophy in Architecture

_ Iris M. Jansen_0643880

_ Dr. J.C.T. VoorthuisNovember 2012

Even a room which must be dark needs at least a crack of light to know how dark it is.- Louis I. Kahn

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ESSAYHow does light affect the architectural spaces, what is the role of the architect within?

During a warm sunny day, I was walking through the city centre of Lisbon, a beautiful city with its streets, buildings, people and culture. I walked through big streets covered by a lot of trees, where sometimes your face catches the interplay of sunbeams and shadows. I continued my journey passing through a smaller old district of this city. Walking in the upward streets, more alleys with high facades, laundry was hanging outside, the windows were closed, and all I could see were the blinds covering the openings of the facade. I could imagine because of the climate during summer, people close their blinds for keeping the spaces inside cool, but during some walk in autumn blinds were closed again.

Seeing this, you start to wonder how people live inside the houses in these alleys; do they only use artificial light instead of natural daylight? When observing the alley you see a repetition of openings in the facades, on your left on your right and across the alley you see the same openings, which perforate the plaster faade. You start to wonder, what is the main reason for designing a faade like that? How important are the windows in the faade for the interior spaces behind it? But you can ask yourself that question where ever you are. Light, particularly daylight; is it an element that interferes with architecture, what should be of a great importance to the architect and his designs, formerly and nowadays? In this essay we will first discuss the particular aspects of light and shadow and how it interferes with spaces. Then, there will be an exposition of the philosophy and ideals of architect Louis I. Kahn about designing with light followed by the interpretation of spaces and designing them.

Light and shadowsLight; it is the first thing that captures your eye after you are born and it is often the last thing you see when you take your last breath. Light makes humans, objects, spaces, architecture and everything we see around us visible by its reflection. Without light, we cannot see, not even darkness. Everyday, people are confronted with light and shadow, two elements that are inseparable. Light can be discussed in two levels, natural light and artificial light, the latter is created by humans. In a discussion about natural light; the dynamic daylight created by the sun. As Rasmussen states: Daylight is constantly changing. The other elements of architecture we have considered can be exactly determined. Daylight alone he cannot control01 I believe no person will disclaim this statement. Daylight is a natural element that changes every minute, caused by the rotation of the earth around the sun. It controls days, time, seasons, which causes that humans have to surrender to this. Also architecture has to adapt this element in its design process. An overall element in architecture is the admirable property of daylight, for urbanism, squares, large buildings, small buildings and details; every scale is confronted by it. Daylight causes an interference of the inside space and the outside space, through openings which are created by design. A window is the most important element in designing architecture to allow the inside spaces to communicate with the outside world and to provide the inside space of daylight. The pitfall of designing with this element is: The same room can be made to give very different spatial impressions by the simple expedient of changing the size and location of its openings.02 In this text there is a concentration on dwellings, dwellings retain different rooms with different uses and therefor need different approaches of daylight. Stating this, an architect has to work with two variables in this subject. The actual design of the space, its dimensions and its use, and its approach by daylight through windows. It makes clear that in every single space you design, there exist numerous opportunities to get the desired amount of daylight in your space. Later in this text, I will discuss the thought of Henry Lefebvre in his book The production of space, where he searches for the reconciliation between mental space (the space of philosophers) and real space (the physical and social spheres we all live).03 How to design with the actual real space, and the way the user it experiences; the mental space at the same time.

This thought makes you realize that architects are not regular designers. Architects design spaces, houses, streets, places that create the world we live in and it interferes with our emotions and well-being. Because of the narrow relation between light and spaces, light will also have a big influence on our emotions, our mental condition, the way we adapt our building environment. Natural light says something about our time and day, the seasons where we are in.Nevertheless, we cannot forget that light and shadow are inseparable. The interaction of light and shadows is very narrow for our human eye. Shadows are caused by the opposite result of light, regarding designing it gives shape and texture to objects. The equilibration between light and shadow is more important then you can imagine for our mental and real space.

Notes

01 Rasmussen, S.E., Experiencing Architecture, (1964), p. 18602 Rasmussen, S.E., Experiencing Architecture, (1964), p. 187

03 Lefebvre, H., Production of space, Donald Nicholson-Smith(transl.), (1991), p. backside

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Master of lightLouis I. Kahn, if he was the master of light cannot be assured, but he had an obsession about designing with light and shadow, that is known. An architect who lived from 1901 until 1974, believed: architecture was not to do with what a building looks like but to do with how spaces are ordered, with how it is built, and how these affect what is experienced by those who inhabit it.04 And this is also a representation of how he designed as an architect. Louis I. Kahn lived in an era of modern architecture, his primary concern throughout his career, was the space within, the interior space and its experience.05 This architect always discussed the experience of habitation. And according to Lefebvre: habitation the human habitat, so to speak are the concern of architecture.06

Around 1950 Louis I. Kahn went to Europe and especially visited, drew and admired the ancient architecture there. During the movie My Architect (2003) his son Nathaniel Kahn said Louis wanted to build modern buildings, but the buildings should have the feeling of ancient ruins. This idea formed his conception of architecture and caused the break of Louis I. Kahn with the International Style around 1955. He truly believed that a natural light was the primary determinant of a rooms quality as a space. As an architect he had an obsession about designing with light and shadow. In his designs, he reflects that the architecture of mass and structure is a maker of powerful shadows, and at this time Kahn began to see sunlight as the most important characteristic of space in architecture.07 The genesis of this philosophy, the conception of mass, structure, light and shadow, you can argue about how he developed it in his designs. He was fascinated by what he saw in the European architectural ancient ruins. After he came back: It was at this time that Kahn began to develop designs with layered walls and they periphery so as to create volumes of light-filled space, at once inside and outside the building, protecting the interior spaces within. He often spoke appreciatively of ruins which, when freed of the limitations of use, stand as hollow masses flooded with light and shadows. As Scully has pointed out Kahns characteristic difficulty (was) within the skin of his building, with, that is, the element which seemed to him neither structure nor space, and in the layered spatial shells of masonry ruins Kahn found structure and space in its purest form.08

I think this perception is true; the genesis of his designs for architectural spaces is based on what he saw in these ruins, just before he started working on his greatest designs.

Concerning the philosophy of Louis I. Kahn by designing architecture with light, we make an observation of his decisions during one of his design processes. One of his first designs that view his conception about daylight, shadows, spaces and its inhabitants. The Tribune Review Publishing Company Building in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, was a project where Louis I. Kahn was working on from 1958-1961, in that period he was also working on his design for the Salk Institute. This building, was the first of Kahns projects to demonstrate the architects emerging articulation of the relationship between structure and light.09 It houses several workspaces; the main goal was to distribute natural light to the interior spaces. As said before, natural light gives us a perception of time and day; therefor we like to live in that light but do not want to be disturbed by it. It should affect the mental space positively. Giving this statement he decided that the openings should be high in the rooms. The light not only is diffused as it bounces off the ceiling but also penetrates deeply and evenly into the space, falling from above onto the work surfaces within.10

His final design shows the rhythm of the horizontally orientated windows, between the beams of the ceiling what will establish his earlier statement. Concerning his east and west elevations; Under these upper windows, the infill walls are split at their centres by tall narrow windows that run from these upper windows to the floor. Together, the horizontal and vertical windows produced a T-shaped opening.11 The elevations on the north and south side are the opposite; because of the different orientation to the sun he treated these facades differently. He used square big openings in the upper half, and more below a rectangular small window. As we stand within, these two types of windows not only reveal for us the solar orientation of the building, with its ever-changing light, but also profile and highlight the precast structure and its masonry supporting piers.12 In every faade of this building Louis I. Kahn worked with a typical collaboration of mass and openings in its structure. The way he designed those openings, was upon his idea of bringing natural light in the interior spaces and let inhabitants experience it. Louis I. Kahn formed a lot of typologies for this subject, published in the book Licht und Raum, Urs Buttiker. Also in this design he developed a new approach concerning this architectural believe. To review, you can see the influence of ancient ruins. Can you imagine by using the small vertical windows from ceiling to

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Notes

04 McCarter, R., Louis I. Kahn, (2009), p. 705 McCarter, R., Louis I. Kahn, (2009), p. 9

06 Lefebvre, H., Production of space, Donald Nicholson-Smith(transl.), (1991), p. 12

07 McCarter, R., Louis I. Kahn, (2009), p. 13608 McCarter, R., Louis I. Kahn, (2009), p. 13709 McCarter, R., Louis I. Kahn, (2009), p. 13810 McCarter, R., Louis I. Kahn, (2009), p. 14011 McCarter, R., Louis I. Kahn, (2009), p. 14112 McCarter, R., Louis I. Kahn, (2009), p. 146

Fig 01. North-east facade of the Tribune Review Publishing Company Building.

Fig 02. Ground floor office space, viewing the upper windows and the vertical windows from ceiling to floor. It provides maximum light from above and small narrow light and view on eye-level.

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floor, you have the same approach in the colonnades of these ruins, but in the opposite way? The mass structured walls will give shadow, where the vertical openings will bring light; it is the interplay of shadow and light. But this interplay, will it give the right imprint to the space? Did he consider the experience of the faade outside?

Space and lightSpace and light, here it will all come together. Architecture, the design of our building environment cannot be without these two understandings. When you speak about architecture, you speak about spaces. But when you speak about spaces you do not only speak about architecture, you also speak about the mental space. Since the existence of humans on this planet we created spaces, the main purpose was to give ourselves shelter for the nature among us, and that still remains our first concern nowadays. We create buildings to give ourselves shelter to our nature and these buildings consist of connected spaces. But instead of only creating inside spaces, we also create the outside spaces we move through. You can also translate that to designing the private and public spaces around us, on the micro or architectural level and the macro level currently treated as the province of urbanists, politicians and planners; the everyday realm and the urban realm; inside and outside.13 As an architect you constantly work between the boundaries of public and private spaces on all kinds of levels. In the current context we will especially speak about the private interior spaces, we will consider the public space as an outside space for now. As said before, daylight causes interference between inside and outside spaces. The architectural elements, doors and windows, are the transferors of getting daylight into our interior spaces.

The architect has to design these openings to get daylight into the spaces that will be used by its later inhabitants. It is not common that every architect really thinks this through; every architect knows that he has to design with spaces and light, but does not really deliberate the effect on each other. And even if they do, they also consider the experiences by the inhabitants in the designed spaces? The inhabitants are the users of the spaces architects design and they experience that space daily. The architect is the only person who can interfere in how people experience a space. But the experience of a space, not only the experience of daylight in spaces can be seen in two different ways; the mental space experience and the real space experience.

Henri Lefebvre states the following: the quasi-logical presupposition of an identity between mental space (the space of the philosophers and epistemologists) and real space creates an Abyss between the mental sphere on one side and the physical and social spheres on the other.14 By all means, a space will provide a mental sphere and a physical sphere because of the existence of a mental space and a real space. As an inhabitant enters a interior space, regarding the space two aspects apply, the geometrical aspect of the space and the visual aspect of the space. Particular is that daylight only has an influence on the visual aspect of the space. But both of these aspects concern the design of the space, it concerns architecture. As for Louis I. Kahn The relationship between that what makes space the structure and that which gives a space life its natural light became the primary focus.15

Now we consider the designed space by the architect and the lived space by its user as the same, Lefebvre states it differently:2 Representations of space: conceptualized space, the space of scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers, as of a certain type of artist with a scientific bent - all of whom identify what is lived and what is per-ceived with what is conceived. (Arcane speculation about Numbers, with its talk of the golden number, moduli and canons, tends to perpetuate this view of matters.) This is the dominant space in any society (or mode of production). Conceptions of

space tend, with certain exceptions to which I shall return, towards a system of verbal (and therefore intellectually worked out) signs.3 Representational spaces: space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of inhabitants and users, but also of some artists and perhaps of those, such as a few writers and phi-losophers, who describe and aspire to do no more than describe. This is the dominated and hence passively experienced space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate. It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects. Thus representational spaces may be said, though again with certain exceptions, to tend towards more or less coherent systems of nonverbal symbols and signs.16

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Notes

13 Lefebvre, H., Production of space, Donald Nicholson-Smith(transl.), (1991), p. 64

14 Lefebvre, H., Production of space, Donald Nicholson-Smith(transl.), (1991), p. 6

15 McCarter, R., Louis I. Kahn, (2009), p. 13716 Lefebvre, H., Production of space, Donald Nicholson-

Smith(transl.), (1991), p. 38,39

Architecture is the making of a room; an assembly of rooms, The Light is the light of that room. Thoughts exchanged by one and another are not the same in one room as in another

- Louis I. Kahn

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He states that the representation of space, the space that the architect thinks about and designs is a different approach than the representational space, the space that the user actually experiences. However for the designing process it should always be connected, the architect indeed designs it for the user. And of course, this also applies on the aspect of daylight in spaces. Daylight will appear in the design of the architect; the architect will have a conceptualized idea of daylight in his spaces. What is of even greater importance is that the architect thinks about what daylight will do to the representational space. In what way the space reacts on the invading daylight and how an inhabitant experiences it. It is about the mental sphere and the physical sphere of a space.

As previously noted, an inhabitant wants to have a perception of time, day and season. It is reasonable that we get up at sunrise and live and work during the day, when our body catches daylight. The biggest struggle for architects and urbanists is, that the design always will be an interpretation. When you design a space, you have to think about its dimensions. Following you will consider your openings, the element that provides the room daylight. Then they start thinking, do I want one big opening, a few small openings? Do I want a diffused daylight from above or a direct sharp light from beside? You cannot talk about spaces in general, there are too many variables; you should speak of one particular space with one opening that provides daylight inside. This is a different approach than of Louis I. Kahn, he held that a plan of a building should read like a harmony of spaces in light Each space must be defined by its structure and the character of its natural light.17

An architect should be aware of the affect of daylight through his designed openings in the faade on the spaces behind the faade. An architect should consider the effect on the representational space for its user, concerning every single space he creates in his design. I believe every single ray of daylight in a room gives an experience to its user. Louis I. Kahn was one of a few architects in his time that thought about this in every single design. He believed that natural light defined a space. Unfortunately you can see in his designs that the habitation inside was primarily, the faade was second. Also in this text interior spaces were the main subject, we should also consider the outside space, but it is another perspective on this subject. For now, there is to conclude that light actually has a great affect on architectural spaces. Presenting the ideas of light, the philosophy of Louis I. Kahn and the connection between mental space and real space made an exposition of light and space. Light has an affect on how inhabitants feel; romantic because of the dusk, moody because of the sharp sunlight in their faces, happy because of the light of sunrise, and so on. But it has also an effect on the real space; many shadows creating a smaller space, bright daylight creating a good view, interplay between light and shadows what creates depth in a space. These are all examples of how light can affect architectural spaces; it plays with our mental sphere and physical, social sphere.

Realizing that however an architect designs a space and openings of this space, the user of this space will remain the ruler of the representational space. In the design process architects have to adapt the influence of daylight in architectural spaces and the experiences of its users to have a satisfying result. However, I will keep wondering why a faade has its design like it is when I walk through the city. But for now, I know the user of the interior spaces will remain the ruler and decides how much and in what way he wants daylight in his spaces. An inhabitant should be able to experience an architectural space as it is designed by its architect. It is the task of the architect to adapt the choices of its user while designing with daylight, to keep the blinds wide open.

Literature

Lefebvre, H., Production of space, Donald Nicholson-Smith(transl.), Maiden, Blackwell Publishing, 1991 (1974)McCarter, R., Louis I. Kahn, New York, Phaidon Press Incorporated, 2009 (2005)Rasmussen, S.E., Experiencing Architecture, Cambridge Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 1964 (1959)

Figures

Fig 01. McCarter, R., Louis I. Kahn, New York, Phaidon Press Incorporated, 2009 (2005), p. 146Fig 02. McCarter, R., Louis I. Kahn, New York, Phaidon Press Incorporated, 2009 (2005), p. 145

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Notes

17 McCarter, R., Louis I. Kahn, (2009), p. 137

space - natural and social, practical and symbolic should come into being inhabited by a (signifying and signified) higher reality. By Light, for instance the light of sun, moon or stars as opposed to the shadows, the night, and hence death; light identified with the True, with life, and hence with thought and knowledge and, ultimately, by virtue of mediations not immediately apparent, with established authority.

- Henry Lefebvre, Prodcuction of space, (1991), p. 34