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).
Steve Jobs
You'll know it's there
Jobs's father had once taught him that a drive for perfection meant caring about the craftsmanship even of the parts unseen. Jobs applied that to the layout of the circuit board inside the Apple II. He rejected the initial design because the lines were not straight enough.
In an interview a few years later, after the Macintosh came out, Jobs again reiterated that lesson from his father: "When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through."
The Apple Marketing Philosophy
Markkula wrote his principles in a one-page paper titled "The Apple Marketing Philosophy" that stressed three points.
The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: "We will truly understand their needs better than any other company."
The second was focus: "In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities."
The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. "People DO just a book by its cover," he wrote. "We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities."
Not just in the details
There falls a shadow, as T.S. Eliot noted, between the conception and the creation. In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important.
The improvements [over Xerox] were in not just the details but the entire concept. The mouse at Xerox PARC could not be used to drag a window around the screen. Apple's engineers devised an interface so you could not only drag windows and files around, you could even drop them into folders. The Xerox system required you to select a command in order to do anything...the Apple system transformed the desktop metaphor into virtual reality by allowing you to directly touch, manipulate, drag, and relocate things. And Apple's engineers worked in tandem with its designers to improve the desktop concept by adding delightful icons and menus that pulled down from a bar atop each window and the capability to open files and folders with a double click.
An icon is a symbol equally incomprehensible in all human languages
An icon is a symbol equally incomprehensible in all human languages. There's a reason why humans invented phonetic languages.
If it could save a person's life, would you find a way to make it faster?
"If it could save a person's life, would you find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time?" [Jobs] asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if there were five million people using the Max, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year that people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year. "Larry was suitably impressed, and a few weeks later he came back and it booted up twenty-eight seconds faster," Atkinson recalled. "Steve had a way of motivating by looking at the bigger picture."
We might as well make them beautiful
The Macintosh team came to share Jobs's passion for making a great product, not just a profitable one. "Jobs thought of himself as an artist, and he encouraged the design team to think of ourselves that way too," said Hertzfeld. "The goal was never to beat the competition, or even to make a lot of money. It was the do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater." He once took the team to see an exhibit of Tiffany glass at the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan because he believed they could learn from Louis Tiffany's example of creating great art that could be mass-produced. Recalled Bud Tribble, "We said to ourselves, 'Hey, if we're going to make things in our lives, we might as well make them beautiful.'"
Models and iterations
Every month or so, Manock and Oyama would present a new iteration based on Jobs's previous criticisms. The latest plaster model would be dramatically unveiled, and all the previous attempts would be lined up next to it. That not only helped them gauge the design's evolution, but it prevented Jobs from insisting that one of his suggestions had been ignored.
For a computer to be friendly
Even though Steve didn't draw any of the lines, his ideas and inspiration made the design what it is. To be honest, we didn't know what it meant for a computer to be 'friendly' until Steve told us.
It's not just a little thing
At one point Kare and Atkinson complained that he was making them spend too much time on tiny little tweaks to the title bar when they had bigger things to do. Jobs erupted. "Can you imagine looking at that every day?" he shouted. "It's not just a little thing, it's something we have to do right."
Real artists sign their work
When the design was finally locked in, Jobs called the Macintosh team together for a ceremony. "Real artists sign their work," he said. So he got out a sheet of drafting paper and a Sharpie pen and had all of them sign their names. The signatures were engraved inside each Macintosh.
Whole widgets
Jobs believed that for a computer to be truly great, its hardware and its software had to be tightly linked. When a computer was open to running software that also worked on other computers, it would end up sacrificing some functionality. The best products, he believed, were "whole widgets" that were designed end-to-end, with the software closely tailored to the hardware and vice versa.
A ripple through the universe
As every day passes, the work fifty people are doing here is going to send a giant ripple through the universe. I know I might be a little hard to get along with, but this is the most fun thing I've done in my life.
Customers don't know what they want
At the end of the presentation someone asked whether he thought they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. "No," he replied, "because customers don't know what they want until we've shown them." Then he pulled out a device that was about the size of a desk diary. "Do you want to see something neat?" When he flipped it open, it turned out to be a mock-up of a computer that could fit in your lap, with a keyboard and a screen hinged together like a notebook. "This is my dream of what we will be making in the mid- to late eighties," he said. They were building a company that would invent the future.
All sorts of ways to use the machine
Jobs wanted to sell Pixar's computers to a mass market, so he had the Pixar folks open up sales offices—for which he approved the design—in major cities, on the theory that creative people would soon come up with all sorts of ways to use the machine. "My view is that people are creative animals and will figure out clever new ways to use tools that the inventor never imagined."
One keyboard at a time
His frustration with Apple was evident when he gave a talk to a Stanford Business School club at the home of a student, who asked him to sign a Macintosh keyboard. Jobs agreed to do so if he could remove the keys that had been added to the Mac after he left. He pulled out his car keys and pried off the four arrow cursor keys, which he had once banned, as well as the top row of F1, F2, F3 ... function keys. "I'm changing the world one keyboard at a time," he deadpanned. Then he signed the mutilated keyboard.
Think Different.
They debated the grammatical issue: If "different" was supposed to modify the verb "think," it should be an adverb, as in "think differently." But Jobs insisted that he wanted "different" to be used as a noun, as in "think victory" or "think beauty." Also, it echoed colloquial use, as in "think big." Jobs later explained, "We discussed whether it was correct before we ran it. It's grammatical, if you think about what we're trying to say. It's not think the same, it's think different. Think a little different, think a lot different, think different. 'Think differently' wouldn't hit the meaning for me"
Ban PowerPoints
One of the first things Jobs did during the product review process was ban PowerPoints. "I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking," Jobs later recalled. "People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they're talking about don't need PowerPoint."
Which ones do I tell my friends to buy?
The product review revealed how unfocused Apple had become. The company was churning out multiple versions of each product because of bureaucratic momentum and to satisfy the whims of retailers..."I had people explaining this to me for three weeks," Jobs said. "I couldn't figure it out." He finally began asking simple questions, like, "Which ones do I tell my friends to buy?"
When he couldn't get simple answers, he began slashing away at models and products. Soon he had cut 70% of them..."I came out of the meeting with people who had just gotten their products canceled and they were three feet off the ground with excitement because they finally understood where in the heck we were going."
After a few weeks Jobs finally had enough. "Stop!" he shouted at one big product strategy session. "This is crazy." He grabbed a magic marker, padded to a whiteboard, and drew a horizontal and vertical line to make a four-squared chart. "Here's what we need," he continued. Atop the two columns he wrote "Consumer" and "Pro"; he labeled the two rows "Desktop" and "Portable." Their job, he said, was to make four great products, one for each quadrant. "The room was in dumb silence," Schiller recalled.
That feeling of putting care into a product
I always understood the beauty of things made by hand. I came to realize that what was really important was the care that was put into it. What I really despise is when I sense some carelessness in a product.
Unlike some designers, [Ive] didn't just make beautiful sketches; he also focused on how the engineering and inner components would work.
He became head of [the design department at Apple] in 1996, the year before jobs returned, but wasn't happy. Amelio had little appreciation for design.
There wasn't that feeling of putting care into a product, because we were trying to maximize the money we made. All they wanted from us designers was a model of what something was supposed to look like on the outside, and then engineers would make it as cheap as possible. I was about to quit.
To be truly simple
Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn't just a visual style. It's not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it's manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.
Total collaboration
The process of designing a product at Apple was integrally related to how it would be engineered and manufactured. Ive described one of Apple's Power Macs. "We wanted to get rid of anything other than what was absolutely essential," he said. "To do so required total collaboration between the designers, the product developers, the engineers, and the manufacturing team. We kept going back to the beginning, again and again. Do we need that part? Can we get it to perform the function of the other four parts?"
Pure and seamless
The connection between the design of a product, its essence, and its manufacturing was illustrated for Jobs and Ive when they were traveling in France and went into a kitchen supply store. Ive picked up a knife he admired, but then put it down in disappointment. Jobs did the same. "We both noticed a tiny bit of glue between the handle and the blade," Ive recalled. They talked about how the knife's good design had been ruined by the way it was manufactured. "We don't like to think of our knives as being glued together," Ive said. "Steve and I care about things like that, which ruin the purity and detract from the essence of something like a utensil, and we think alike about how products should be made to look pure and seamless."
When we make a model and realize it's rubbish
Much of the design process is a conversation, a back-and-forth as we walk around the tables and play with the models. He doesn't like to read complex drawings. He wants to see and feel a model. He's right. I get surprised when we make a model and then realize it's rubbish, even though based on the CAD renderings it looked great.
He loves coming in here because it's calm and gentle. It's a paradise if you're a visual person. There are no formal design reviews, so there are no huge decision points. Instead we can make the presentations fluid. Since we iterate every day and never have dumb-ass presentations, we don't run into major disagreements.
A ritual of unpacking
I love the process of unpacking something. You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel special. Packaging can be theater, it can create a story.
The iMac
Ive and his team worked with Apple's Korean manufacturers to perfect the process of making the cases, and they even went to a jelly bean factory to study how to make translucent colors look enticing. The cost of each case was more than $60 per unit, three times that of a regular computer case. Other companies would probably have demanded presentations and studies to show whether the translucent case would increase sales enough to justify the extra cost. Jobs asked for no such analysis.
Topping off the design was the handle nestled into the iMac. It was more playful and semiotic than it was functional. This was a desktop computer; not many people were really going to carry it it around. But as Ive later explained:
Back then, people weren't comfortable with technology. If you're scared of something, then you won't touch it. I could see my mum being scared to touch it. So I thought, if there's this handle on it, it makes a relationship possible. It's approachable. It's intuitive. It gives you permission to touch. It gives a sense of deference to you.
We'll slap a little color on this piece of junk
"The one thing Apple's providing now is leadership in colors," Gates said as he pointed to a Windows-based PC that he jokingly had painted red. "It won't take long for us to catch up with that, I don't think."
Jobs was furious, and he told a reporter that Gates, the man he had publicly decried for being completely devoid of taste, was clueless about what made the iMac so much more appealing than other computers. "The thing that our competitors are missing is they think it's about fashion, and they think it's about surface appearance," he said. "They said, We'll slap a little color on this piece of junk computer, and we'll have one, too."
The Apple Store
"Ron [Johnson] thinks we've got it all wrong. He thinks [the Apple store] should be organized not around products but instead around what people do." There was a pause, then Jobs continued. "And you know, he's right." He said they would redo the layout, even though it would likely delay the planned January rollout by three or four months. "We've only got one chance to get it right."
Jobs liked to tell the story—and he did so to his team that day—about how everything he had done correctly had required a moment when he hit the rewind button. In each case he had to rework something that he discovered was not perfect.
The iPod
Suddenly everything had fallen into place: a drive that would hold a thousand songs; and interface and scroll wheel that would let you navigate a thousand songs; a FireWire connection that could sync a thousand songs in under ten minutes; and a battery that would last through a thousand songs.
"We suddenly were looking at one another and saying, 'This is going to be so cool,'" Jobs recalled. "We knew how cool it was, because we knew how badly we each wanted one personally."
Cannibalize yourself
Like many companies, Sony worried about cannibalization. If it built a music player and service that made it easy for people to share digital songs, that might hurt sales of its record division. One of Jobs's business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. "If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will."
The job of art is to chase ugliness away
Bono later explained that not all corporate sponsorships were deals with the devil.
The 'devil' here is a bunch of creative minds, more creative than a lot of people in rock bands. The lead singer is Steve Jobs. These men have helped design the most beautiful art object in music culture since the electric guitar. That's the iPod. The job of art is to chase ugliness away.
The right kind of building can do great things for a culture
"Steve had this firm belief that the right kind of building can do great things for a culture," said Pixar's president Ed Catmull.
Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. "There's a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat," he said. "That's crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they're doing, you said 'Wow,' and soon you're cooking up all sorts of ideas."
When our tools are broken, we feel broken
In his piece [for Time] Lev Grossman correctly noted that the iPhone did not really invent many new features, it just made those features a lot more usable. "But that's important. When our tools don't work, we tend to blame ourselves, for being too stupid or not reading the manual or having too-fat fingers...When our tools are broken, we feel broken. And when somebody fixes one, we feel a tiny bit more whole."
Scoop it up and whisk it away
At one point Jobs looked at the model [for the first iPad] and was slightly dissatisfied. It didn't feel casual and friendly enough, so that you would naturally scoop it up and whisk it away. Ive put his finger, so to speak, on the problem: They needed to signal that you could grab it with one hand, on impulse. The bottom edge needed to be slightly rounded, so that you'd feel comfortable just scooping it up rather than lifting it carefully.
A pedestrian cloak
Even before the iPad went on sale, Jobs was thinking about what should be in the iPad 2...there was a peripheral issue that he focused on that most people hadn't thought about: The cases that people used covered the beautiful lines of the iPad and detracted from the screen. They made fatter what should be thinner. They put a pedestrian cloak on a device that should be magical in all of its aspects.
To read things that are not yet on the page
My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated the make great products. Everything else was secondary...the products, not the profits, were the motivation.
Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.
Click
I'm about fifty-fifty on believing in God. For most of my life, I've felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye.
I like to think that something survives after you die. It's strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and that it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures.
But on the other hand, perhaps it's like an on-off switch. Click! And you're gone.
...Maybe that's why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices.