Light Extracts

“Maurice smith awakened me to most everything I still consider important in architecture, especially the physical spirit and enlivening powers of built up space, and the general notion that architecture begins with association, with acts of reciprocity. Gyorgy Kepes showed me that light was a creative material as real as any other, and how it could be sculpted and arranged to make the world a more lovely and human place.”

“Okakura Kakuzo’s the book of tea”

“Matsuo Basho’s Narrow Road to the interior”

“Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery”

“Kenko’s Essays in Idleness”

“Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji”

“Shonagon’s Pillow Book”

“Gunter Nitshke’s essays ‘Shime: Binding/Unbinding’ and ‘Ma’: The Japanese Sense of Place.’”

“More generally, I owe an intellectual debt to Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of space, Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane, Christian Norberg-Schulz’s Genius Loci, and Gyorgy Kepes’ essays and exhibitions on the art of designing with light.”

Page 6

“In the smoky light that pervades an old Zen temple or tiny tea house, the human eye is engaged indirectly, as if by stealth. The soft grey tones shift all attention to the elusive air between solid things, and away from the things themselves, even then seeming to melt away under our gaze, acting as dissolving agents that evade direct touch and soften what is solid into a placid mirage. These whitened and emptied qualities of light must have been created by and for a human spirit ready to go beyond the outer aspects of things, and beyond a reality aimed to satisfy vision. Their starved tones express a taste for something more deep and mysterious than sensual or pleasure could ever give. With the freshness of a breeze that begins to stir only when the light is faint, this colourless art bypasses body and mind, directing its charm to the more inward thirst of the soul, a thirst that longs for seclusion and quiet."

“Upon entering one of the great temples of Kyoto or Nara, or the Edo-Period Street of an old post or merchant town, one’s first impression is of an exquisite blankness. The atmosphere is muted and still. All the flat and softly attenuated tones are drained of outward expression, dimmed of fire and brilliance except for tiny accents here and there, and reduced overall to a gentle monochrome grey. Bathing over the simple wood buildings, already weathered by the elements into a kind of driftwood, is an equally grey natural light, its rays bleached by the vaporous sky, and paled a little more by reflections off pure white sand, and filtering through white paper screens. The rays eventually land inside upon warmly muted surfaces of bamboo, wood, and straw, and walls of mud tinted to restful hues by mixtures of sand. Rising over these quietly faded interiors are great tile roofs of cooler grey tones that harmonize well with the skies outside, turning leaden or silvery according to weather, at times as iridescent as the scales of raw fish. Out in the countryside, farmhouses are thickly roofed in a thatch whose straw has turned a warm yet silverfish grey from beatings of sun and rain. The Japanese city of today, built out of an endless maze of dreary concrete, is even more brutally vacant in tone than the places of old, while lacking, all of the latter’s emotional depth and spiritual serenity.”

“The beautifully plain and simple light which belongs to old Japan, and creates such a lonely mood in traditional architecture, reflects the visual and emotional experience of the soft luminosity outside. While tremendously varied from day to day, and season to season, the prevailing skies over every country help determine the unifying spirit of that place by the way  they filter sunshine and cast an overall ambience onto the earth. The moods of a people are intensely affected by how this prevailing light can shade and colour the way a landscape is seen and felt, giving rise to different regional temperaments and ideas about reality/ Under moist Northern skies, objects appear ineffably soft and blurred, and endowed with a mysterious, even mystical quality. The clear skies of the south produce the opposite, a stark and absolute reality, as un-diffused rays of sun sharply define everything they illumine. The prevailing quality of light also determines the spectral composition which people are exposed to day after day, exerting a unique mix of wavelengths with physiological and psychological impacts, ranging from cooler to warmer tones, and thus different from those who dwell under scorching sun. In a country mist like Japan, is under greying skies in Britain or Northern France, the monochrome light tends to calm and quiet down physical reality, creating peaceful scenes with a soft luminosity. The light between us and the world is diluted and spread-out to a colourless transparent medium, an ether that slightly empties everything seen through its lens, bringing a ghosting and elusive mood the landscape.”

“The Washed-out quality of light which so determines the genius loci of Japan, must have had a profound effect on the developing senses and minds of its ancient people, who eventually made a cultural asset, even a poetry and art, from the prevailing mood of absence. In a quiet teahouse or remote mountain temple, as well as the most recent urban works by architects with a distinctly grey sensibility, such as Tadao Ando, Fumihiko Maki, and Toyo Ito, the pale light from outside is brought near and built into space. Grayness pervades the choice and finish of materials, and overall ambience of rooms, as well as the radiating spirit of the exterior and space around it. The silent tones of the landscape have been recreated by a strict monochrome palette that mutes all contrasts, softening and hushing the visual field as surely as a blanket of mist. Upon entering a space where the colours are so drained and thinned, the effect is not only of calm, but of feeling numb. The mind, the senses, and the emotions are not only soothed, but are almost sedated. Conceptual clarity has been dulled. The tones with which we visually connect are washed out, lost its ability to arouse and stimulate us, and gives way to a deliberately exhausted atmosphere, the air chilled and desiccated, deadening for the outreaching body and mind, yet precisely for those reasons, awakening for the quieter inward life of the soul.”

“The subtle mood of a soft grey atmosphere, however, cannot be explained by vacancy alone. While cold and forbidding, especially to many foreigners, this colourless light holds a special kind of intensity. The feelings aroused by different qualities of light are difficult to speak about clearly, much less define, for light has no intellectual meaning even though it touches the depths of our being in every way. We are subjected to the temperaments of light around us, we respond directly to their glow and colour, but it is almost impossible to make any sense of the way they move us, which can only be felt as an indistinct murmur in the soul, moving the unconscious without our knowledge. Thus we tend to link the simple and automatic pleasures of light with more the physical world to the rhythmic feelings of his own inner life, which unfold with the colourful cycles of day and season, and the evolving stages of human development, passing from youth and maturity through decline and death. By these analogies, the greyish rendering of light in Japanese architecture would seem to express an overall feeling of faded energy, and those moments when life is reaching an ebb. A light so intentionally restful, so week and frozen in colour, immediately evokes the quietude of nightfall and winter, as well as our own declining years.”

“As we stand in an ancient Zen temple, or the most recent aluminium building by Maki or Ito, the light all around appears grey with age. The mood is one of exhaustion, and of that melancholy peace attained at the end of life, when hair begins to silver, and skin to pale, signs that youth is now over and death is looming on the distant horizon. Gone are the lavish and energetic tones of rising sap, and of blood pulsing beneath skin. Instead the rays carry hints of life slowing down, and an inherent mortality. Also in them is the daily slowing down of nightfall and dusk, and the annual depression of winter, all of which are times when light is losing colour and intensity, when movement and activity turn sluggish, and the entire world is absorbed in an atmosphere something like smoke, with every solid thing dissolving and spreading in air. Amid the colorless palette of night and winter, life on earth settles down to rest, and prepares for renewal, a tranquillity we have not only learned to equate with the failing tones outside, but to sense deep within as our bodily hormones and rhythms reach their lowest ebb. Every day of every year of our life, we experience the quiet feelings of this greyish light, and the delicious moment of rest it brings to our cycle of energy.”

“it appears that in Japan the aesthetic mood of an entire culture has become devoted to these still and exhausted moments of light,. Like people all over the world who become rooted in a place by coming to terms with, and even more, developing a deep affection for the spirit of their natural setting, the Japanese have created an architecture fully in tune with the faded light outside. The lovely pale glow and black-and-white world of Japanese buildings make it possible to dwell under greying skies, and to feel at home in that gently forsaken light. The same climatic resonance I s built into the fabric of traditional villages and towns, which we still can glimpse in the old Kyoto streets of Sannenzaka or Ninshijin, paved with granite and line by white plaster and ash-grey woods. The whitewashed and black-tiled kura along the canals of old Kurashiki excel in the play of monochrome tones, juxtaposing plaster walls made shining white by mixing in ground oystel shells, with deep black tiles that are rich in variation, their blackness outlined in white by cylindrical plaster moldings, or set in a vibrant diamond pattern. The frail atmosphere built up in these spaces reflects not only an adaptation, but a celebration of the subtle tones in the sky overhead, and wish it a unique appreciation for the beauties of decline, for the muted glow of aged things, for that special beauty which belongs to the perishable.

“Among those architects today who are still in touch with their native skies and the muted traditions of the past, one comes first to Ando, whose work takes the greyish light of Japan as its point of departure. His buildings mirror the visual qualities of the national climate, but also express the way reality is transformed by the climate. Thus his architecture deprives the eye of easy sensory comfort, and pursues instead an art of vacancy, softening and distancing physical reality. This elemental art begins with a reduction and simplification of the building into exquisite shells of unfinished concrete. While solid and stark in form, the grey substance is magically emptied of boundary and weight, and fills with a blurry monochrome air. The barren surface has been lit in a way that renders it soft and airy, sometimes wavy and fabric-like, elsewhere a half-congealed mist or fog. The surface is also liquidated here and there by patches of silky grey paint left from the wooden formwork, adding a latexed sheen with causes the solid edge, already bone-like in hue, to shimmer as if wet, and dissolve away into something not quite there. The scantiest means have been used to gather inside the soft grey dusk, and the numbing stillness of winter. While reduced to a quiet simplicity not easily achieved, and built out of blank elemental matter, the empty chambers are never completely vacant, for they are bathed in a easily achieved, and built out of blank elemental matter, the empty chambers are never completely vacant, for they are bathed in a light that rich with age. The air is still, yet strangely immanent, strangely full of harmony, radiance, and something like grace.”

“The hushed atmosphere created by Maki is based instead on a palette of grey metals and granite stonework, clearly an industrial palette, yet able as the materials of old in helping people to feel at home under Japanese skies, under what the poet Basho described as ‘Go stone skies.’ As if physically absorbing the soft glow of a morning mist, Maki’s buildings are coated in a silver-grey patina, their pale surface more dull than outwardly shiny. Walls of large-panelled aluminium, stainless steel, and glass have been cut out and overlaid in a collage of thin sheets, interspersed to look through one another, an abstraction of mists rising up between street and interior. The colourless surfaces are then folded and dented, gridded and incised, to insert an array of aging shadows into the muted reflections, making them a little like weathered skin. While often freshly glowing inside, an ageless soul behind a wrinkled face, the aluminium exteriors of Spiral, Tepia, and the Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, all have the countenance of old objects showing their years with grace. The garish skin may be emptied of all the juices of life, and withered by creases and lines, crinkles and seams, but it has dimmed and tarnished in a way that suggests the mellowness of age.”

Page 12-19

“The ‘cool shrunken’ beauty of this architecture reflects not only the grey character of the landscape, but the emotional core of that way of life so central to Japanese culture – Zen. A monochrome and withered light were essential to create that ‘worship of poverty’ and ‘primitive simplicity,’ wabi and sabi, which Daisetz Suzuki has argued in Zen and Japanese Culture lie at the soul of both Japanese Buddhism and the cult of tea. What could be more expressive of Zen’s forsaking of worldly desire and craving, and its pursuit instead of a calm inner life, than a mood of withdrawal? The grey light created in these buildings was empty of colour, purified of sensuality, austere in character, humble in simplicity, and thus in many ways a perfect atmosphere for the deep solitude of Zen. The grey softness brought an aloneness that one could savor and enjoy. In them was a haven for the soul, a retreat for the mind to give up its normal preoccupations with outer objects, and begin to clearly and calmly divert its attention inward. The plain and simple, yet profoundly solemn quality of light did not impose itself in any way, and kept rooms and gardens free of the bustle of the world. Every distraction which might stimulate the mind and senses, such as rational accuracy, passionate emotions, or sensuous luxury, became washed away in the greyish void. The overall effect was for empty space to be made palpable, and in its negation, for the ego, the I, to not only be ignored, but momentarily paralyzed.”

“There also ‘breathes’ in the frail blackness and whiteness of Japanese space, to borrow a phrase from the poet Rainer Rilke, ‘an atmosphere as though of descending night, filled with the sweet sadness of the moon.’ It is as though the sensual warmth of the sun had been replaced by a slowly spreading moonrise, that natural light most associated with greyness, and with the rising dreams of night time. Colours have been emptied to values, with all things blanched and deathly pale. The dry gardens of Zen temples must have been closely identified with this lunar character, for they made exhaustive use of light grey stones and sand that reach aesthetic heights under moonlight.”

“And reradiates so much white light it appears haunted, giving off a mineral glow foreign to lunar atmosphere, made completely enveloping by their all-gray materials. In them the air is still and tranquil, but the extreme leaching out of colour also arouses a slight anxiety, placing us in a terrible emptiness of space that calms us yet seems coldly desolate, almost alien, leaving us infinitely alone. The somnambulant light which has helped loosen our links with a frenzied outer world, also suggests an emissions from outside the sphere of the sun, a radiation not quite belonging to the day lit hours when we still feel fused to earthly things. Time is made to stand still, clocks have stopped, and life is suspended between waking and subconscious states.”

“His rooms are grainy and fog-like, as if rationally emptied yet at the same time intuitively full, blanked out only to logical seeing and to conscious intellectual activity.”

“Only a vague and floating silvery mist appears present inside, recalling the hazy white-out of a full moon, or the related colourless air of a snow-storm, a fog-bank, or a sauna, the kind of enveloping no-thing-ness designed and described by contemporary light- artists such as Robert Irwin and James Turrel as a Ganzfeld. As in the latter, the undifferentiated space and its sensory deprivation break our perceptual habits, cutting us off from direct contact with the solid world, shifting the process of perception from outward to inward, making room in our life for a kind of seeing that is not done with the eyes. Up and down lose their orientation, space and form and air dissolve together, everything floats. Surrounded, pervaded, and suspended in this molecular greyness, each room appears veiled in a colourless halation, an experience like waking from a dream, of having returned to some preconscious place and opening one’s eyes to a nocturnal unknown one can’t quite give voice to.”

“Is it any wonder the Japanese have so much affection for the silvery brightness of the moon, whose languid glow seems to capture the very essence of their spirit of place, as if distilled into an elixir? And what other aspect of nature is more attuned to the ultimate emphasis of that light – to obscure logic and make room for the contemplative side of life? A lonely nocturnal light does not come at us, but gives off a hazy, dream-inducing atmosphere, calming and softening everything it shines upon. For centuries Japanese builders have handled daylight with similar effects, to construct an atmosphere that falls silence and effaces itself, so that we in its spell are dissuaded from looking outward, but rather drawn into ourselves to better contemplate the inner regions of our own existence. By  contrast with the rich and distracting light of the sun, the barren and colourless glow of another kind of light has diffused through rooms, recreating by day the introspective void of night, and that mysterious vision of the invisible we only can see from behind closed eyes. Clothed in white, everything has been stripped of carnality and wrenched from the sensuous pleasures outside, made dead to the outer world, and endowed with vacant depths that dim physical sight just as they break off ties with the body.”

“In the murmuring silence of Japanese space, an overall greyness works instantly to dull our antennae, leaving a colour negation into which the human spirit is drawn to quiet meditation, there to become more aware of its own awareness. But the austere monochromaticism has also stripped space of everything that is outwardly alive and flesh-like, just as the moon does, allowing something uncanny to rise to the anaemic and haggard surface. Things appear drained of blood, as if wrapped in the thin air of some dead planet. The deathly pale atmosphere exudes a haunted presence, almost a funeral air, a netherworld receptive to ghosts and wraiths. Perhaps beyond its lonely mood, the unearthly paleness of these places retain some connection with the spirit world of ancient Japan, with phantoms and apparitions of Shinto ‘otherness’ that emerge from and vanish into mist, with spirits lying at the edge of the underworld and just beyond the visible.”

Page 20-24

“In viewing (Ryoan-ji) one has the sense of being transported into a vast void, into another dimension of reality – time ceases, and one is lost in reverie, gazing at the rocks that rise, ever in the same but different spot, out of the white mist of gravel… Here is an immaculate universe swept clean… Isamu Noguchi.”

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“There is a feeling of time’s having stopped, of an infinity of winds having weathered and left a shell… Isamu Noguchi”

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“We prefer not to polish silver. On the contrary, we begin to enjoy it only when the luster has worn off, when it has begun to take on a dark, smoky patina. Almost every house holder has had to scold an insensitive maid who has polished away the tarnish so patiently waited for…”

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Antartica

“For me a night like this, with a clear moon shining on snow, is the best – and there is not a trace of color in it. I cannot describe the effect it has on me, weird and unearthly somehow… Murasaki Shikibu, the tale of Genji”

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“A space filled with soft light… Toyo Ito.”

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Autumn Gold

“Closely related in feeling, and often experience side by side with the grey tones of more black-and-white Japanese space, is a subtle golden atmosphere.”

“The overall mood of this yellowing air is linked to the moments just before winter and nightfall, when nature blazes up in colour just before grey exhaustion. At these transitional moments of day and year, earth and sky exude rich colours that are no longer clear and fresh, their yellows now more golden, the reds coppery, and the oranges burnt, with shadows saturating them more and more.”

“The sumptuous tones are accompanied by signs of the onset of old age. Buildings painted in these tones embody the hours and seasons of light at its greatest metamorphoses – the twilight and autumn, when poised on the brink between maturity and death, between the final moments of one ending cycle and the interlude of rest before another begins.”

“Hidden in this majestic exhaustion of colour is a note of melancholy, for along with its expression of beautiful warm days is an evening nostalgia. The atmosphere reflects an age of life that is peaking, like that afternoon or early autumn, but it is also tiring in vitality, and showing a secret decay, giving off a slight morbidity as the glowing colours take to the air in the manner of smoke or decomposing leaves. These contradictory feelings are essential to the experience of wabi and sabi, and are wonderfully magnified along the wooded edges of ancient mountain temples, such as Nanzen-ji or Honen-in in Kyoto.”

“Time seems to unfold before our eyes. Growing soft about the gray and gaunt buildings is a lush warm light, clinging to the shrivelled wood and geologic stone like a perfume of age. The tones hover uncertainly between a glorious sunset and cold gray dusk, and between the fires of autumn the frosts of winter. The light vacillates between matter and spirit, fading life and immanent death, the end of time and the beginning of time. There is a king of weary twilight sensation, when contradictory elements melt for a moment together, mediating for an instant between the sumptuous and the plain, eloquence and silence.”

Page 46

“Seem to hint as well at the gentle breath of morning, and at the delicate light of springtime”

“Desire the deliciously tactile surfaces, there is really only the substance of light before us, which seems to float and exist entirely apart from matter, yet as something that can be touched by the eye and plumbed by vision. Time and space have merged into a single entity, a state halfway between drowsiness and hallucination.”

Page 48-50

“More than any other substance on earth, real gold is the epitome of light solidified in matter, as I the inherent darkness of planetary matter had for once been transmuted into something of the skies, of the heavens, something that glows from deep within and appears to give off as well as receive light.”

“Modern man, in his wall-lit house, knows nothing of beauty of gold; but those who lived in the dark houses of the past were not merely captivated by its beauty, they also knew its practical value; for gold, in these dim rooms, must have served the function of a reflector. Their use of gold leaf and gold dust was not mere extravagance. Its reflective properties were put to use as a source of illumination… Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows.”

Page 52

“By luminosity that exists from solid forms.”

Page 54

“The house is built of yellow gold… Buddha is the ‘gold immortal’… Its golden efflorescence suddenly blooming… The golden flower is light… The secret of the Golden Flower.”

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“I had stopped to take a casual look at this reconstructed temple for no specific reason when it suddenly materialized before me. The golden pavilion was shimmering under a mid-winter afternoon sung, the sheen of its gold-foiled walls mysterious in the midst of dark groves beside a black pond. It was beautiful beyond all logic or reason… Kazuo Shinohara.”

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“A reddish light belongs not only to transitional phases in nature, but marks their most climactic moments of destruction and creation. The long wavelengths are close to those of infrared radiation, to heat, and are closely linked to experiences of high temperature and the release of energy. Red is the color of the light emitted by matter in its most active metamorphic states – molten or rusting metal, fiery embers, dancing flames, live coals, the hearth and the funeral pyre, massive stars at the end of stellar evolution. As burning things are dying and going up in smoke, they last appear to the eye as a glowing, red-hot energy. This is evolution. As burning things are dying and going up in smoke, they last appear to the eye as a glowing, red-hot energy. This is the color at the radiating core of all self-luminous existence, which we tend to glimpse only as matter is turning into spirit. Or the reverse.”

“Perhaps there is no other single color so bound to the razor edge between life and death, and so able to evoke the contradictory feelings of beginnings and endings, even suggesting the two are closely related, if not one and the same. This dual color phenomenon recurs every day. As the sets along the western horizon, its dying red orb casts a final, momentary wash of pink over clouds and earth. The sky and earth are also reborn each day in a similar bath of luminous pink. This veil colors dusk. The transitional seasons of the year also are signalled, if a little more vaguely, by peaks of redness. The end of each summer’s growth is marked by a turn from green to crimson red, especially in a country like Japan where maples abound, and the first and certainly most beautiful signs of spring in this country are clouds of cherry blossoms. When the cherry trees being to bloom in April, painting the air pink, one knows that the juices of life are reviving and winter is left behind.”

“One is tempted to see also in a bright red glow a reflection of the life giving blood normally hidden in our body, a redness that is always bright with energy, and which is only visible at moments of crisis and renewal, when life is coming and going. Just as the sun and earth awake in a cast of pink air, and begin to turn drowsy in a similar cast at nightfall, man and other mammals come into being as an embryo and foetus floating in blood, and die, or face intimations of death, with a spilling of that same vital fluid. We are born in a shower of redness and frequently perish in it as well.”

Page 76

“The sequence of spaces experience in the Water Temple is not only meant to culminate in a spiritual core, but to pass the visitor through a gradual initiation of light and colour, unfolding through a series of breaks in existence before finally arriving at a light that has transfigured the world. This ritualized journey is inherently mystical, and constructs the kind of spiritual adventure believed essential for renewing the soul. The process beings with purifying passage of whiteness, pulling one out of the everyday growing blackness. A symbolic death and reabsorption has occurred at this final boundary, where we and our world have sunk and died into pitch darkness, when we are suddenly awakened by an intense supernatural light of the brightest red, whose flood permeates the depths of matter.”

Page 84

Painted Shadows

“The optical quality which most sets apart the atmospheres of traditional and modern buildings in Japan. Is the former’s thickness of shade.”

“Cast deep inside was an array of transparent shadows with pooled effects that found a home in the simple interiors, there to paint rooms into quiet sanctuaries of darkness.”

“The quality that we call beauty,’ he writes, ‘must always grow the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends. And so it has come to be that the beauty of a Japanese room depends on a variation of shadows, heavy shadows against light shadows – it has nothing else.”

Page 100

“The penumbras are assembled in ways that recall Leonardo da Vinci’s sfumato in which, as he observed, ‘these shadows do not stand out in a hard and dry manner, but are imperceptibly submerged.’”

“Recesses are made deepest where daylight cannot penetrate. Dark woodwork absorbs excess light. Space is folded into ever dim layers. Bits of beam and post rise out of utter blackness. Even the gloomiest alcoves and ceilings have beautiful textures of wood and bamboo that the eye struggles in vain to make out.”

Page 102

“The cavernous darkness is inhabited, as if reflecting our own secret depths, with the stumps and silhouettes of latent figures not quite finished.”

“Kazuo Shinohara”

“Floors of pounded earth, the doma, were made from traditional mixtures of clay, lime, and salt found in old farmhouses. The naked foundation of the house was kept open to the dark regions of the earth, and to the irrationality which belongs to the underground, that realm which Gaston Bachelard refers to in his book The Poetics of Space, as ‘the dark entity of the house, the one that partakes of subterranean forces. Shinohara has written of his aim with these cool and black earthen floors, ‘to convey unusual or the hidden in man’s mind, the dark passions, anxieties, and sense of loneliness. In a time when the world is flooded with industrially produced objects, I tried to renew this ancient, non-rational, valuable material.’ In the House of Earth from 1966, an earth floor is combined with a dark iron-sheet wall and black ceiling, and even an unground bedroom, the entire house rendered into a ‘black space’ meant in shinohara’s words to ‘correspond deeply with the irrational part of the mind.’”

“Tanikawa residence of 1974”

“Cosmic symbolism is found in the very structure of the habitation. The house is an imago mundi. The sky is conceived as a vast tent supported by a central pillar; the tent pole or the central post of the house is assimilated to the pillars of the world… The stripped tree trunk whose top emerges through the upper opening… is conceived as a ladder leading to heave; the shamans climb it on their celestial journeys, and it is though the upper opening that the shamans set out on their flights… Mircea Eliade.”

Page 104

“This small house is one of the most astonishing attempts in the history of architecture to give back to man lost areas of his being, to recover the most primitive depths of inhabitation, the invisible roots of our psyche, which are now entirely obliterated by an over-rational society. Darkness has been used to disturb our imaginations, to disrupt any quick and easy reactions to space, arousing deep and mythic fears that are part of who we truly are, making us aware of and sounding the depths of our own inner space.”

Page 106

“From time immemorial, darkness has also provided the crucial experience of negation which blots out what has been, in order that life can be made new. Where light fades away, the world goes with it, setting the stage for energy, and thus life, to be reborn.”

“This kind of shadow initiation, and passage from Darkness into Light, appears in one form or another in most religious beliefs, and in the spatial choreography of most religious architecture.”

Page 108

“Shadows are not valued solely in a negative sense (non-being) but also in a positive sense: the sum of the ‘unformed,’ ‘seeds.’… We retrieve in the symbolism of shadows the note of a temporality, of ‘eternity,’ of the suspension of becoming… The return to shadows implies the immersion into the pre-formed… The initiate…

Is at once ‘dead’ and ‘in the process of birth’ (embryo), but he ‘feels’ at the same time that his particular condition is also the condition of the world in the Cosmic Night, of the embryo-World which is not yet born. Mircea Eliade.”

Page 109

“The more secret light of an inner world beings to murmur and rise to the surface. Acting as an incubation space shut far away from the sensory light outside, which tends to draw us out of ourselves, this black translucid realm helps us instead. To withdraw into ourselves, dimming the vision so we might glimpse what is behind the eyes, leading us down to the blackness of our own inner depths there in achieve the deepest meditation.”

Page 110

“Such is our way of thinking – we find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates… Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows.”

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“There must be a crack somewhere in the construction which allows enough natural light to come in to tell how dark it is… Louis Kahn”

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“Seeing stars from the bottome of a well can also be a sculpture… Isamu Noguchi”

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Cloudy Translucence

“In the misty weather of a forested island like Japan, the rays of sun are continually drained of power and left dispersed in the air.”

Page 138

“The translucency of smaller paper windows, the round or square shitajimado, is beautifully enhanced by delicately overlaid shadows thrown on the surface from behind.”

“From inside a dimly lit room, the shitajimodo forms a kind of abstract shadow-box. The paper acts as a rear-projection screen to display mysterious, only hintered0at images on the brink of vanishing.”

Page 140

“In Hara’s faceted, crystalline walls we find a medium of pure sublimation, a setting for countless surging images that are entirely free of directed though. These luminous happenings catch the light and take to the air, inhabiting space like visions that briefly free of directed thought. These luminous happenings catch the light and take to the air, inhabiting space like visions that briefly appear and disappear. By illuminating the multifold glass from varied windows, and then setting dark and often highly reflective material behind, reality crumble away into fields of glowing emanations, a realm where spirits of light and air have made their home. Here the real and imaginary cease to be contradictions.”

Page 142-144

“The Japanese… are, on the whole, of gentle nature. And there is a good reason to presume this, for the physical atmosphere enveloping the whole island of Japan is characterized by a general mildness, not only climatically but meteorologically. This is mostly due to the presence of much moisture in the air. The mountains, villages, woods, etc., enwrapped in a somewhat vaporous atmosphere, have a soft appearance; flowers are not as rule too richly colored, but somewhat subdued and delicate; while the spring foliage is vividly fresh. Sensitive minds brought up in a n environment like this cannot fall to imbibe much of it, and with is a gentleness of spirit… Daistez Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture.”

Page 149

“The moon is risen over the opposite peak and the bamboo shadow are cast over my paper window… Jakushitsu”

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“Plaza Mikado, Tokyo by Edward Suzuki, 1990. View from office, looking through inner layer of frosted glass with bamboos behind.”

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“Myoshin-ji Temple, Kyoto. Misty Zen monochrome painting on fusuma.”

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“Ryoan-ji Temple, Kyoto. Weathered earth wall.”

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“STM House, Tokyo by itsuko Hasegawa, 1991. Colorless exterior at dusk.”

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Woven Air

Page 174

“The screens work as optical devices to simultaneously detach and connect. They create on the one hand a slightly withdrawn, soft-focus view conductive to meditation, but on the other hand a tranquil, and even purified, contact with nature. A gently sifted light was perfectly suited for those who wanted to construct a solitude still in touch with the world, who sought that difficult synthesis of a retreat kept open to the pulse of nature, and thus a union between heaven and earth.”

Page 176

“A screen also subverts the way we participate in seeing the world, reducing the role of logic and expanding the role of intuition. One senses this first in the air of secrecy which grows around a veiled space. One can spy on those outside without being seen. And a veil makes the world on the other side more intriguing because it is not clearly visible. Contours and features are half erased. Objects are abstracted and hidden behind layers of mesh we can barely peer through. The mysterious scene exerts a powerful seduction on the eye by its very incompleteness, by the uncertainty of what is left unseen. There is all the lure of the forbidden, the challenge of the unknown, and the thrill of detection. By renouncing total visual clarity, and its predetermined facts, the screened-over light begins to empower the mind’s eye by giving it room to maneuver.”

Page 178

“There is something, I think, almost spiritually humble and pure about a simple screen trickling with light. In its loss of flesh and fatty tissue, that extra mass and sensuality which belong to a wall, as to a body, and its reduction down to the bones of life, is there not a hint of the ecstasy of poverty? The airy woodwork is stripped down to its bare essence. All excess is gone. All possessions and finery are relinquished. The structure is trim and lean, emptied of everything it doesn’t need. All indulgence at the surface of life is missing in this wall assembled with thrift using the least possible and most elementary material. Alone before God, opened to currents of nature, starved and emaciated, the screen peaks of utmost plainness and simplicity, as if it had destitute aspect of sabi or wabi as the pursuit of fuga, a primitive existence close to the forces of elemental nature, and speaks of those who cherish such a life as furabo, meaning literally in suzuki’s words ‘an old monk who wanders about fluttering like a thin piece of fabric in the wind.’ Bsaho himself had written: ‘There is something in this body composed of one hundred members and 9 orifices, which is called provisionally a furabo. Does it refer to a thin robe in tatters, flapping in the wind?’, and goes on to call himself a furabo, ‘a man whose life is like a wind-blown piece of gauzy fabric.’ What could be more architecturally expressive of this notion of fuga than a tattered and wind-blown screen?”

Page 180

“A place that seems to be veiled in mist from afar… spaces defined by layers of thin membranes through which one may sense the changing aspects of nature… The visitor ascends through a space that seems enveloped in clouds and trees and encounters light and wind… Itsuko Hasegawa.”

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“The see through perforated aluminium appears to shift with subtle changes in the internal and external light conditions… Itsuko Hasegawa.”

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“The theme was that of ‘Clouds over the City.’ Much of the building is coated with perforated metal to allow for a rather magical overlaid effect; each level appears to float like clouds… Itsuko Hasegawa.”

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“It is moving to see a thin wisp of cloud across a very bright moon… Sei Shonagon, The pillow book… the supple and comfortable space woven by nature… Itsuko Hasegawa”

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“After so many years of hardship my robe is in tatters. And a half of it is now all blown away with the wind… Old Zen saying.”

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Watery Luster

“The floor-boards in the ante-room are shining so brightly that they mirror everything nearby… Sei Shonagon, the Pillow Book.”

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“The uniformly white or crystalline gravel was an ideal sculptural medium to deflect attention away from its own materiality and onto the falling light. Each minute shift in contour produced a gradation in brightness or darkness, giving an impression the sand was sculpted more out of light itself than something solid. Like the equally reflective and vacant surface of the sea, another beautiful non-thing the mineral surface of the garden displays only the fleeting perceptual drama of light and counterlight, trembling with each slight change in sky or weather.”

“Tanizaki describes this dull radiance as ‘the sheen of antiquity,’ marked by ‘a polish that comes out of being touched over and over again, a sheen produced by the oils that naturally permeate an object over long years of handling.”

“We sense in this luster brought out by conscientious rubbing, that ‘increase in an object’s human dignity’ described by Bachelard, in which wooden ‘objects that are cherished in this way really are born of an intimate light, and they attain to a higher degree of reality than indifferent objects, or those that defined by geometric reality. For they produce a new reality of being.”

Page 206

“’Awaken’ a material ‘that was asleep… A house that shines from the care it receives appears to have been rebuilt from the inside; it is as though it were new inside.’ Coming awake with strokes of love, the wooden floors seem almost endowed with a consciousness of their own.”

“Certainly the most superb craft of this kind belongs to the ancient art of black lacquerware, upon which Tanizaki’s words cannot be improved, comparing its ‘depth and richness to that of a still, dark pond… its colors built up of countless layers of darkness, the inevitable product of the darkness in which life was lived.’”

Page 208

“A work of architecture which is rough outside yet glistens within, shares in the almost primal intimacy we associate with exquisite seas shells.”

Page 210

Floating on the Wind

Page 230

“The cascade of roofs is so broken into separate hovering elements, so limbered up by shadow at every overhang, and so flickering in tilework, letting in air at every seam, that the overall appearance is of wings stirring and spread out in air, aflutter with energy, perhaps the hint of a bird or aircraft, but certainly an aerial being.”

Page 232

“The feeling of architecture being a little adrift, open to the currents of life and never completely still, or wilfully directed, reflects a strong identification with the living forces of nature. The phenomena of sky and earth are incessantly coming and going passing by and a move in space. Clouds and mist waft along on the breeze, light and shade travel from horizon to horizon, moon and sun and star course through the sky, seasons revolve without end. Long ago the Shinto kami were identified with this drifting and cycle of energy, never thought to settle in one place but to perpetually arrive and depart, descending to earth for a time only to leave for some faraway place. The strong nomadic character of traditional Japanese architecture, and the evanescent feel of its light, may derive in part from this sense of all life on earth being migratory in nature. By constituting little more than a temporary refuge, or hermitage, architecture could emulate this transitory world of the gods and nature.”

“Life as a journey, and architecture as a celebration of being on the way, a shrine to the ‘wandering life,’ was nowhere more beautifully expressed than the travel diaries of Basho. Always dissatisfied with material comfort and permanent roots, Basho pined for a form of dwelling true to the eternally homeless state of man. His deep faith in the replenishing experience of travel, its elemental loneliness and utter individuation when undertaken properly, stripped of all comforts in order to breathe in the basic realities of life, and so by necessity primitive and relying on nothing, were all reflected in the humble places he sought out along the way, as well as his own dilapidated hut in Edo. Reflecting the same spirit as Henry David Thoreau’s simple hut at Walden Pond, and Thoreau’s aim to ‘live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, ‘the elemental shelters of Bashos were porous to breeze and sky, mere temporary shells in which to take refuge, easy to visit and easy to leave. Space was barely enclosed and, in a sense, was physically dispossessed by the way light seeped through and crumbled its boundaries, producing a shelter so pervious and ruined that a leaking roof was on longer a hazard but the very means to live near to moonlight and raindrops.”

“In recent years, the named architecture of Toyo Ito has alluded directly to Basho’s desire for traveling, and for a Zen way of life of ‘No-abode,’ a floating detachment from being tied down. Light is handled by Ito not only to dematerialize the building fabric into feathery meshes and screens, and to bathe space in a vacantly sighing mist, but to eat out more solid aspects of the building shell and fill them with rising air. Everything heavy is made pervious to the comings and goings of light and air, as if little more than a housing for transient phenomena, a vessel for the wandering currents of sun and breeze, sound a smell. Contemporary means have been used to attain that sublime leakage of natural forces found in sukiya huts.”

Page 234-236

“Zennism, with the Buddhist theory of avenescence and its demands for the mastery of spirit over matter, recognized the house only as a temporary refuge for the body. The body itself was but as a hut in the wilderness, a flimsy shelter made by tying together the grasses that grew around – when these ceased to be bound together they again became resolved into the original waste… Okakura Kakuzo, The Book of Tea”

Page 236

“Ito has described his wish ‘to restore architecture to the level of shelter; that is, to the most primitive level of habitation… a minimal shelter closer to the fabric that covers the boats of the water people in Hong Kong than it is to a roof.”

Page 238

“A glass observation tower is set atop a great urban staircase, where the city itself can strive for the freedom of the sky, and its open horizons.”

“To travel implies returns, and no image is more profoundly moving of the solitude and loneliness of travel, and the warmth of return, than to see a light waiting on the distant horizon, calling out through the waste of night. Looking over and guiding one’s arrival, offering a heading to aim for and to make a landfall.”

Page 240

“We have the impression that the stars in heaven come to live on earth… Gaston Bachelard, the Poetics of Space.”

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“You may ask whence I come, but really there is no whence of my coming. Nor have I any fixed abode of my own. I move with the clouds from mountain to mountain impressing my footsteps ever in the remotest parts of the earth…Yama-uba a No Play.”

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“I should like my house to be similar to that of the ocean wind, all quivering with gulls… Rene Cazelles, De terre et d’envolee”

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Captured Alive

Page 274

“In tits original sense… shakkei means neither a borrowed landscape nor a landscape that has been bought. It means a landscape captured alive. The distinction here is a peculiarly Japanese, and it reflects the psychology of the garden designer. Its implications run more or less like this: when something is borrowed, it does not matter whether it is living or not, but when something is captured alive, it must invariably remain alive, just as it was before it was captured… Teiji Itoh, space and illusion in the Japanese Garden.”

Page 276

“The eye sees it, But no hands can take hold of it – The moon in the stream.”

Page 282

“The still point of the turning world… T.S.Eliot”

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Chrysalis

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“Lao-tzu put forward the idea that the reality of a room lay in its empty space rather than its roof and walls, but in Japanese rooms the two phenomena are merged, with a wrapping of empty lines not only half-defining a void, but dissolving away the enclosure at the same time.”

“Part of the way these airy lines vacate space is by shifting attention away from the inside and out to the container, so that the former seems to lose substance as well as emphasis but then rendering that boundary elusive, unsubstantial, and subject to a gradual peeling, causing the space within to leak and dissipate. Roland Barthes touches on the former idea by his description of the festive wrappings of Japan as a ‘framing’ in which ‘everything is line,’ and noting that things are ‘wrapped with as much sumptuousness as a jewel. It is as if, then the box were the object of the gift, not what it contains,’ resulting in a kind of ‘ecstasy of the package’ whose contents are ‘energetically protected as if the finish, the framing, the hallucinatory outline’ are not so much aimed ‘to  protect in space but to postpone in time.’ Likewise, the architectural room bound up in exquisite lines turns into a package of space that may be opened only in a highly conscious and roundabout way. The involving edges and infinitely delayed process of entrance overshadow any final arrival, and whether or not the latter occurs at all is open to question. The beautiful lines of the boundary appear to unravel before our fingertips, begging our touch, and shifting our attention away from the ultimate goal and onto the course of approach, from conclusion to journey, form ending to beginning from objective to ritual. Maki calls this climax-less aspect of Japanese space oku, and speaks of its ‘ceremony of attainment.’”

Page 296

“The idea of space woven out of light has mythic origins extending back to Chinese and Indian cosmology, in which ethereal thread and rope were considered the primordial means by which the world and its beings were once created through acts of divine ‘weaving.’ Written in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad is the belief that ‘it is by the air, as by a thread, that this world and the other world and all beings strung together… They say of a dead man that his limbs have become unstrung – for it is the Air (the breath) that binds them like a thread. In the archaic East, as Mircea Eliade shows in The Two and the One, existence was thought to be ‘woven’ by immaterial ‘ropes of wind’ and ‘cosmic cords,’ analogous in many ways to the life0lines of umbilical cords. According to these embryo-cosmic myths, things were brought into being by a cosmic weaver, an event visualized by the image of a spider and its silvery web, a familiar transient world also sewn into existence, and when the space and objects those worlds eventually reached their end, the webs fell apart.

“Japan’s glowing ropes and string, cords and knots, seem at least formally related to these old Eastern creation images of woven breath, perhaps because in Eliade’s words, ‘the most satisfactory images by which to express (the unity and integration of being) were the thread, the spider, the weft and weaving. The spider’s web brilliantly showed the possibility of ‘unifying’ space from a Center, by binding together the four cardinal points.’”

Page 298-300

Incantation

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“All life is rhythmic in nature, and we humans are made out of cycle of time just as we are of flesh and bone. The Japanese have always know this truth, which has generally eluded the West, and at least until recent times constructed their world in a wave like structure of altering light and shade.”

Page 326

“The resonant and softly humming spaces which so enliven the traditional architecture of Japan, return us in the most immediate way to the underlying thread in Japanese light – an image of life is perpetual renewal. There are close affinities between the lovingly cadenced light in every ancient temple and farmhouse, and the very echoes of life on earth. The ever-reviving beats exhale and inhale with us, and contract and expand like our pounding heart. They invoke as well our waves of falling asleep and waking at dawn. In them is the waxing and waning moon, the return of the tides, the circle of the seasons, the oscillating tones express that hidden energy of life which beats at the core of earthly existence, those fading reviving tremors of a planet that continue to pulse in our Stone Age lungs and veins, so that as the American poet Charles Olson once said, ‘whoever has rhythm has the universe.”

“Rhythmicity in Japan also has deep religious undertones, a pattern of divine renewal which must have been identified long ago with the primal beats of the planet. The ancient Shinto spirits appear and disappear in concert with the cycles of nature, cycles that are always related to the fading and reviving energy of the sun. Buddhist doctrine also conceived of life as a constant flux, one in which all aspects of the world are seen as impermanent and undergoing continuous transformation. Taoist and Zen sleeps. What better way could be fluctuating state of the kami, or the resonant Tao and spirit of Zen, be given form, than by currents of waxing and waning energy made visible – by altering flashes of light against dying shadow. In the tonal rhythms of shrines and temples, each return of light like a minor new dawn or minor new era, even a glint of divinity, a moment of illumination when the spirit breaks out of darkness. These tonal beats become mesmerizing when stretched over the long processional routes of great Shinto shrines, such as the Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto, or Nara’s celebrated Kasuga Shrine, where the long approach path is lined by thousands of votive stone lanterns, set against a rhythmic background of cedars, and ascending up thousands of rhythmic steps and landings cut in the mountainside.”

Page 328

“Takefumi Aida.”

“Aida is well aware of the deeper meaning of these vacillations of light-and-dark, writing of their twofold reference to that ‘life and death, regeneration and preservation, stability and instability, permanence and contemporariness,’ and going on to argue that ;these pairs of ideas need to be united if we are to free ourselves of fixed notions in architecture. An architecture of fluctuation can help achieve such a unification.’”

Page 330

Centring

“The peaceful tonic of light and shade goes beyond any mere representation of meditative quiet, to actually help one each that state, urging the breath to calmly undulate, as if exposed to a tuning fork. Vibrating chords in the world outside gradually entrain our own inner rhythms, the harmony of outer beats spreading to inner beats, stabilizing and regulating the breath, the heartbeat, helping the viewer become still and relaxed as a prelude to inward vision.”

Page 332

“In the booming vibrations, or equally in the echoing chants and prayers of Buddhist sutras accompanied by drums and bells, we perhaps can see with the ear, what the eye can hear in the fluttering lattice and tile – the softly rippling hum of cosmic energies.”

Page 334

“The rhythm of reality is on the brink of existence and nonexistence… The Secret of the Golden Flower.”

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“Nature is always in motion, never at a standstill… Daistez Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture.”

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“Daisetz Suzuki”

“If Nature is to be loved, it must be caught while moving.”

“Natural light brings to our planet the motive force behind these quiet perturbations, with its evolving yet oscillating current of energy, always transforming and colouring, yet always revolving the same way it has since the dawn of time. The light of the sky is always mutating, yet always returning to the same point in space and time. Daylight is ever new in its brightening and dimming, cooling and warming, sharpening and blurring, strengthening and weakening, rising and setting, yet it is also the most convincing evidence we have on the face of the earth that life is able to repeat and endure. Perhaps the secret of eternity lies in this flowing and metabolic kind of order – a mobile energy from the skies which always recurs but never quite the same, and so is always in a state of becoming.”

“While he could always step outside to watch change unfold in the sky, man has sought since prehistory to build closer links with that arena of light, by shaping buildings to receive and display solar movement, even to enhance our perception of the changing slant of light, the mobility of the skies was revealed and brought near, and ultimately drawn in to inhabit buildings. Sometimes the building was simplified into a blank canvas for the sun to paint its liquid strokes with every passing moment, moving about freely as if by its own will. Other times the building itself was choreographed to transform, as features would be highlighted or coloured by shifting rays, their physical shape perceptually altered, heightened, or even obliterated. In either case, the moving light was not limited to merely illuminating form and space, or tied to their static volumes, both of which it could enter and excite, but was given the power to fluidly come and go, to dapple or skim over solid things, to inhabit empty space and live out its own supple destiny. As if something alive, the shapes of light were seen to flicker and grow, colour and age, warm and cool, and eventually exhaust themselves, dying away with the fading hours and seasons.”

“Buildings designed to host and move in concert with passing streams of sun are able to keep us connected with a flowing natural world, and share in the pulse of a revolving planet and circling heavens.”

Page 350-352

“Robert Irwin.”

“The surrounding walls of Kazuo Shinohara’s house in Ashitaka recall, in their monotonously repeating solids and voids, a prehistoric ring of megalithic stones. The perimeter is a series of solar frames set up much like the panoramic rows of standing stones at Avebury and stonehand, which Neolithic astronomers used to follow the progression of celestial cycles, standing stones at Avebury and Stonehenge, which Neolithic astronomers used to follow the progression of celestial cycles, standing at the centre and looking out through the apertures to observe the passing transit of sun and moon. Shonohara has written that ‘the horizontal and vertical planes of this house were conceived as a projection screen for the ever alternating sun and shadow,’ and the space of domesticity into the lapse of celestial time… In a manner so explicit and expressive as to transform the house to a greater world of cosmic space, particularly the moving sun which rotates around the house from east to west, slanting in the rows of parallel beams.”

Page 360

“Shoei Yoh”

“The universe comes to inhabit the house.”

Page 362

“I do not know whether this momentaristic tendency in Japanese psychology is in their native blood is due in some measure to the Buddhist Weltanshauung, but the fact is, beauty is something momentary and ever-fleeting, and if it is not appreciated while it is fully charged with life, it becomes a memory, and its liveliness is entirely lost… Beauty is ever alive, because for in there is no past, no future, but the present, you hesitate, turn your head, and it is no more… Daistez Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture.”

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“It is always flowing, it never halts, nor does it turn into a sold… Daistez Suzuki, Zen and Japanese culture.”

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“The light lattice… not only gives order to the space but, like a sundial, reveals the passing of time. It is as if it were the centre of the universe… Shoei Yoh.”

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“The shadows fall across the long-nosed sundial and tell me that I exist, I exist… Lawrence Durrell, Spirit of Place.”

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“It could be a day, a year, or a lifetime. In the beginning there is darkness or nothingness. The light grows to bare visibility then dies and this is revived again. Suddenly there is a flash and it is dawn. The light becomes hotter, the heat intense, until it bursts into flame. Autumn arrives, followed by winter. The man of doom walks in the darkness… Isamu Noguchi.”

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