Listening to the light
”Beethoven, deaf, listened to the light.”
Kerouac interview conducted by mail with John Clellon Holmes, 1963
Le Corbusier
“Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light”
“Architecture is the masterly, correct, and magnificent play of masses brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light: light and shade reveal these forms; cubes, cones spheres, cylinders or pyramids are the great primary forms which light reveals to advantage; the image of these is distinct and tangible within us without ambiguity. It is for this reason that these are beautiful forms, the most beautiful forms. Everybody is agreed to that, the child, the savage and the metaphysician.”
Le Corbusier
Light, Louis Kahn
An architecture must have the religion of Light. A sense of light as the giver of all presences. Every building, every room must be in natural light because natural light gives the mood of the day. The season of the year is brought into a room it can even be said that a sun never knew how great it was until it struck the side of the building. When a light enters a room, it is your light and nobody else’s. It belongs to that room. The Kimbell Art Museum uses all natural light. After some initial designs that I made, Richard Kelly put the blueprints to the computer and came out with a shape that sent the light along the vaults. The vaults can span a hundred feet without any column. I didn’t allow anything to enclose the building.
Louis Kahn, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, 1966-1972
Architectura sine luce nulla architectura est, Campo Baeza
It is when an architect discovers that light is the central theme of architecture that he or she begins to understand; that they become a real architect.
Light is not some vague or diffuse thing to be taken for granted just because it is always there. The sun does not rise every day for nothing
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Thus when the architect traps the sun and its light, having it penetrate the space formed by structures of greater or lesser mass which transmit the primitive strength of gravity from the ground upwards, it is light that breaks the spell, making the space float, levitate and soar. Hagia Sophia, the Pantheon and Ronchamp are tangible proofs of this portentious reality.
Light has as much materiality in architecture as stone. We express the opinion that builders in the Gothic period accomplished marvelous sorcery, making architecture work to its utmost to attain more light. Properly speaking, we should be saying that what those architects did was to work with light as matter, as another material. Since they knew that the sun shines diagonally, they stretched their windows, raising them to trap the diagonal, nearly vertical rays. They foresaw the possibilities available to us today. Rather than organizing stone to trap light, Gothic architecture can be seen as a desire to organize light, material light, in order to provide spatial tension..