Light & Illumination
159. Light on Two Sides of Every Room
Only a moment of light
A vaporous middle-world
Light and Space
The gentle light of shoji screens
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.
Irwin Fluorescents
In order: Kenny Price, Blue Lou, Legacy, Fourfold, Niagara.
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.
Frosted and transparent
Irwin's window arrangement at the Dia:Beacon.
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.
A time when time was not
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.
Waiting to repay the gift of vision
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.
Darkness becomes you
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.
White walls
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.
Lights and lamps
The street of an old town
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.
Desired qualities of light
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.
Daylight should not tyrannize architecture
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.
Without effective eyes to see, does a light cast light?
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.
135. Tapestry of Light and Dark
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.
Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, 1959–65
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.
Let there be light
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.
If you look for the light
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
Darkling in the eternal space
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day.Wasting light
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.
- Poured
The great soundless whirl of darkness
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.
In the world of sunlight
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.
Midwest sunset
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.
In Praise of Shadows
A Book by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki & Thomas J. Harper- Things that shine and glitter
- A naked bulb
- The Japanese toilet
- Empty dreams
- Most important of all are the pauses
The Finish Fetish Artists
An EssayFor 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”
Perfectly Clear (Ganzfield)
An Artwork by James TurrellThe light that hits the glass
A Quote by Larry BellMy media isn’t glass, it’s the light that hits that glass.
How the light gets in
A Quote by Leonard CohenThere is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.Light & Shadow
An Artwork by Kumi YamashitaCHAIR, 2014
FRAGMENTS, 2009I 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 Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering is the full expression of what "You and Your Research" outlined. It's a book about thinking; more specifically, a style of thinking by which great ideas are conceived.
Gifts of knowledge to humanity
There are many commonalities we can admire in these endeavors: the dazzling leap of imagination, the broad scope of applicability, the founding of a new paradigm. But let’s focus here on their form of distribution. These are all things that are taught. To “use” them means to learn them, understand them, internalize them, perform them with one’s own hands. They are free to any open mind.
In Hamming’s world, great achievements are gifts of knowledge to humanity.
Hamming-greatness
Hamming-greatness is tied, inseparably, with the conception of science and engineering as public service. This school of thought is not extinct today, but it is rare, and doing such work is not impossible, but fights a nearly overwhelming current.
It cannot be taught in words
How to be a great painter cannot be taught in words; one learns by trying many different approaches that seem to surround the subject. Art teachers usually let the advanced student paint, and then make suggestions on how they would have done it, or what might also be tried, more or less as the points arise in the student’s head—which is where the learning is supposed to occur!
Preparing for problems
I firmly believe in Pasteur’s remark, “Luck favors the prepared mind.” In this way I can illustrate how the individual’s preparation before encountering the problem can often lead to recognition, formulation, and solution.
Student's future, not teacher's past
Teachers should prepare the student for the student’s future, not for the teacher’s past.
If you know what you are doing
In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.
In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.The homogeneity of knowledge
The standard process of organizing knowledge by departments, and sub-departments, and further breaking it up into separate courses, tends to conceal the homogeneity of knowledge, and at the same time to omit much which falls between the courses.
Another goal of the course is to show the essential unity of all knowledge rather than the fragments which appear as the individual topics are taught. In your future anything and everything you know might be useful, but if you believe the problem is in one area you are not apt to use information that is relevant but which occurred in another course.
An information service society
Society is steadily moving from a material goods society to an information service society. At the time of the American Revolution, say 1780 or so, over 90% of the people were essentially farmers—now farmers are a very small percentage of workers.
What will the situation be in 2020? As a guess I would say less than 25% of the people in the civilian workforce will be handling things; the rest will be handling information in some form or other. In making a movie or a tv program you are making not so much a thing, though of course it does have a material form, as you are organizing information.
From hands to machines
It has rarely proved practical to produce exactly the same product by machines as we produced by hand. Mechanization requires you produce an equivalent product, not identically the same one.
A matter of choice and balance
More than ever before, engineering is a matter of choice and balance rather than just doing what can be done. And more and more it is the human factors which will determine good design—a topic which needs your serious attention at all times.
Central planning gives poor results
Central planning has been repeatedly shown to give poor results (consider the Russian experiment, for example, or our own bureaucracy). The persons on the spot usually have better knowledge than can those at the top and hence can often (not always) make better decisions if things are not micromanaged.
"Real programmers"
At the time the Symbolic Assembly Program (SAP) first appeared I would guess about 1% of the older programmers were interested in it—using SAP was “sissy stuff,” and a real programmer would not stoop to wasting machine capacity to do the assembly.
Using your own expertise
Almost all professionals are slow to use their own expertise for their own work. The situation is nicely summarized by the old saying, “The shoemaker’s children go without shoes.”
History tends to be charitable
History tends to be charitable. It gives credit for understanding what something means when we first do it. But there is a wise saying, “Almost everyone who opens up a new field does not really understand it the way the followers do.”
The reason this happens so often is the creators have to fight through so many dark difficulties, and wade through so much misunderstanding and confusion, they cannot see the light as others can, now the door is open and the path made easy.
Mass production of variable products
Computers have opened the door much more generally to the mass production of a variable product, regardless of what it is: numbers, words, word processing, making furniture, weaving, or what have you. They enable us to deal with variety without excessive standardization, and hence we can evolve more rapidly to a desired future!
Thinking is a matter of degree
Perhaps “thinking” is not a yes/no thing, but maybe it is a matter of degree.
Making coal miners into programmers
Many humans at present are not equipped to compete with machines—they are unable to do much more than routine jobs. There is a widespread belief (hope?) that humans can compete, once they are given proper training. However, I have long publicly doubted you could take many coal miners and make them into useful programmers.
A minimum size to fish
There is the famous story by Eddington about some people who went fishing in the sea with a net. Upon examining the size of the fish they had caught, they decided there was a minimum size to the fish in the sea! Their conclusion arose from the tool used and not from reality.
Spelled with a lowercase letter
I used to tease John Tukey that you are famous only when your name was spelled with a lowercase letter such as watt, ampere, volt, fourier (sometimes), and such.
Why it can't be done
Moral: when you know something cannot be done, also remember the essential reason why, so later, when the circumstances have changed, you will not say, “It can’t be done.”
When you decide something is not possible, don’t say at a later date it is still impossible without first reviewing all the details of why you originally were right in saying it couldn’t be done.
Intellectual shelf life
Let lab equipment lie idle for some time, and suddenly it will not work properly! This is called “shelf life,” but it is sometimes the shelf life of the skills in using it rather than the shelf life of the equipment itself! I have seen it all too often in my direct experience. Intellectual shelf life is often more insidious than is physical shelf life.
Beware of jargon
Beware of jargon—learn to recognize it for what it is, a special language to facilitate communication over a restricted area of things or events. But it also blocks thinking outside the original area it was designed to cover. Jargon is both a necessity and a curse.
You cannot consume what is not produced
The only law of economics that I believe in is Hamming’s law: “You cannot consume what is not produced.” There is not another single reliable law in all of economics I know of which is not either a tautology in mathematics or else sometimes false.
I walked the crest of the dune
Thus piece by piece I walked the crest of the dune, and each time the solution slipped on one side or the other I knew what to do to get back on the track.
God loved sand
“God loved sand, He made so much of it.” I heard, inside myself, that we were already having to exploit lower-grade copper mines, and could only expect to have an increasing cost for good copper as the years went by, but the material for glass is widely available and is not likely to ever be in short supply.
The Hawthorne effect
At the Hawthorne plant of Western Electric, long, long ago, some psychologists were trying to improve productivity by making various changes in the environment. They painted the walls an attractive color, and productivity rose. They made the lighting softer, and productivity rose. Each change caused productivity to rise. One of the men got a bit suspicious and sneaked a change back to the original state, and productivity rose! Why? It appears that when you show you care, the person on the other end responds more favorably than if you appear not to care. The workers all thought the changes were being made for their benefit and they responded accordingly. In the field of education, if you tell the students you are using a new method of teaching, then they respond by better performance, and so, incidentally, does the professor. A new method may or may not be better, indeed it may be worse, but the Hawthorne effect, which is not small in the educational area, is likely to indicate that here is a new, important, improved teaching method. It hardly matters what the new method is; its trial will produce improvements if the students perceive it as being done for their benefit.
What you learn for yourself
What you learn from others you can use to follow;
What you learn for yourself you can use to lead.The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics
We now see that all this “truth” which is supposed to reside in mathematics is a mirage. It is all arbitrary, human conventions.
But we then face the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. Having claimed there was neither “truth” nor “meaning” in the mathematical symbols, I am now stuck with explaining the simple fact that mathematics is used and is an increasingly central part of our society, especially in science and engineering. We have passed from absolute certain truth in mathematics to the state where we see there is no meaning at all in the symbols—but we still use them! We put the meaning into the symbols as we convert the assumptions of the problem into mathematical symbols, and again when we interpret the results. Hence we can use the same formula in many different situations—mathematics is sort of a universal mental tool for clear thinking.
What can be put into words
It is not evident, though many people, from the early Greeks on, implicitly act as if it were true, that all things, whatsoever they may be, can be put into words—you could talk about anything: the gods, truth, beauty, and justice. But if you consider what happens in a music concert, then it is obvious that what is transmitted to the audience cannot be put into words—if it could, then the composer and musicians would probably have used words. All the music critics to the contrary, what music communicates cannot (apparently) be put into words. Similarly, but to a lesser extent, for painting. Poetry is a curious field where words are used but the true content of the poem is not in the words!
Initial psychological distance
Creativity seems, among other things, to be “usefully” putting together things which were not perceived to be related before, and it may be the initial psychological distance between the things which counts most.
Tossing an idea around
Can we do anything to increase creativity? There are training courses, and books, as well as “brainstorming sessions” which are supposed to do this. Taking the brainstorming sessions first, while they were very fashionable at one time, they have generally been found to be not much good when formally done, when a brainstorming session is carefully scheduled. But we all have had the experience of “tossing an idea around” with a friend, or a few friends (but not a large group, generally), from which insight, creativity, or whatever you care to call it, arises and we make progress.
Prepare your mind for the future
Probably the most important tool in creativity is the use of an analogy. Something seems like something else which we knew in the past. Wide acquaintance with various fields of knowledge is thus a help—provided you have the knowledge filed away so it is available when needed, rather than to be found only when led directly to it. This flexible access to pieces of knowledge seems to come from looking at knowledge while you are acquiring it from many different angles, turning over any new idea to see its many sides before filing it away. This implies effort on your part not to take the easy, immediately useful “memorizing the material” path, but to prepare your mind for the future.
Stuck with a problem
If you cannot drop a wrong problem, then the first time you meet one you will be stuck with it for the rest of your career.
Experts and impossibility
If an expert says something can be done he is probably correct, but if he says it is impossible then consider getting another opinion.
Always time to fix it later
As the saying goes:
There is never time to do the job right, but there is always time to fix it later,
especially in computer software!
The average adult
Averages are meaningful for homogeneous groups (homogeneous with respect to the actions that may later be taken), but for diverse groups averages are often meaningless. As earlier remarked, the average adult has one breast and one testicle.
Solution to evaluation and back again
A second reason the systems engineer’s design is never completed is the solution offered to the original problem usually produces both deeper insight and dissatisfactions in the engineers themselves.
Furthermore, while the design phase continually goes from proposed solution to evaluation and back again and again, there comes a time when this process of redefinement must stop and the real problem be coped with—thus giving what they realize is, in the long run, a suboptimal solution.
The heart of systems engineering
While the client has some knowledge of his symptoms, he may not understand the real causes of them, and it is foolish to try to cure the symptoms only. Thus while the systems engineers must listen to the client, they should also try to extract from the client a deeper understanding of the phenomena. Therefore, part of the job of a systems engineer is to define, in a deeper sense, what the problem is and to pass from the symptoms to the causes.
Just as there is no definite system within which the solution is to be found, and the boundaries of the problem are elastic and tend to expand with each round of solution, so too there is often no final solution, yet each cycle of input and solution is worth the effort. A solution which does not prepare for the next round with some increased insight is hardly a solution at all.
I suppose the heart of systems engineering is the acceptance that there is neither a definite fixed problem nor a final solution, rather evolution is the natural state of affairs. This is, of course, not what you learn in school, where you are given definite problems which have definite solutions.