Light and dark: blog presentation

Yin and yang are complementary opposites that interact

within a greater whole, as part of a dynamic system

‘Light and Dark’ is an eternal theme. It includes the concept of good and bad, bright and shade, shallow and deep. 
Light gives human beings the hope and Dark makes people despair. 
However without Dark, people can’t see the Light: they are like the Yin and Yang, restricting each other but can’t living alone.

“光和暗”是永恒的主题；其中包含了好、坏；明、暗；浅、深的含义。光明给人们带来希望；黑暗让人绝望。但没有黑暗则无法展现光明，二者如同阴阳两极，相互制约，缺一不可。

‘Guāng hé àn’ shi yǒng héng de zhǔ tí; Qí zhōng bāo hán lé hǎo huaì, míing àn, qǐan shēn de hán yìi.
Guāng míng gěi rén men daì laí xī wàng; Heī àn ràng rén jué wàng.
Dàn meí yǒu heī àn zé wú fǎ zhān xiàn guāng míng, er zhě rú tóng yīn yáng liǎng jí, xiāng hù zhì yuē, quē yī bù kě.

Light and dark: conceptual map

A lamp that mimics the moon

The 'Eclipse lamp' by Vico Magistretti for Artemide (Milano), 1967

Two years before man's first landing on the moon, Vico Magistretti designs for Artemide the 'Eclipse lamp', an icon of Sixties Design and the Space Age.

The lamp has two sphere shades, the inner one rotable, so one can have different lights like the changing ones from the moon.

Translucent wood

This material looks like any other piece of wood until you shine light through it, at which point you discover that, unlike any other wood product, it is translucent.

Modern innovative materials usually give to a traditional material (such as wood or concrete) some unespected features (brightness, lightness) that traditionally belong to another one.

Clic here to see the patent.

Measuring time by the Sun

For thousands of years, people used sundials to tell the time. The first sundials were used more than 3,500 years ago in Egypt.
A sundial is a device that measures time by the position of the Sun.
In common designs such as the horizontal sundial, the sun casts a shadow from a thin rod or a sharp, straight edge, onto a flat surface marked with lines indicating the hours of the day.
As the sun moves across the sky, the shadow-edge progressively aligns with different hour-lines on the plate.

Clic here to see a patent of a modern adjustable sundial.



How to make a sundial on your own

Light breaks the darkness

Tadao Ando: Church of the Light

Church of the light (sometimes called "Church with Light") is the Ibaraki Kasugaoka Church's main chapel. It was built in 1989, in the city of Ibaraki, Osaka, and it is one of the most famous design of the Japanese architect Tadao Ando.

The Church of the Light consists of three 5.9m concrete cubes (5.9m wide x 17.7m long x 5.9m high) penetrated by a wall angled at 15°, dividing the cube into the chapel and the entrance area. One indirectly enters the church by slipping between the two volumes, one that contains the Sunday school and the other that contains the worship hall. The benches, along with the floor boards, are made of re-purposed scaffolding used in the construction. A cruciform is cut into the concrete behind the altar, and lit during the morning (as it is facing east).

The origin of light in Inuit mythology

Tulugaak from an illustration by Agnes Nanogak, Holman island, 1983

In Inuit mythology, Tulugaak was the creator of light. The Inuit are very tied to the past, trying to explain to some extent the existence of some creatures, such as the onset of light.

In the early times, there was only darkness; there was no light at all. At the edge of the sea a woman lived with her father. One time she went out to get some water. As she was scraping the snow, she saw a feather floating toward her. She opened her mouth and the feather floated in and she swallowed it. From that time she was pregnant.
Then she had a baby. It's mouth was a raven's bill. The woman tried hard to find toys for her child. In her father's house was hanging a bladder that was blown up. Now the baby, whose name was tulugaak (Raven), pointed at it and cried for it. The woman took the bladder down from the wall and let the baby play with it. But in playing with it, he broke it. Immediately, it began to get light. Now there was light in the world, and darkness, too.

Interactive light wall

In 2009 Philips presented Lumiblade®, an OLED installation, a luminescent wall that reacts directly to passers-by, creating mirrored reflections of their ‘shadows’ amid the light.
This installation is both functional and highly experiential, it invites to “play” with this new technology and experience it as much more than a light only: a softly glowing mirror, an interactive tool, a very aesthetic light source.

Clic here to see the OLED device patent by Philips.

Transparent and light transmitting concrete

The transparent concrete Litracon® is a combination of optical fibres and fine concrete.
It was developed by Hungarian architect Áron Losonczi since 2001 and it can be produced as prefabricated building blocks.

Clic here to view patent images.

Homesick light

静夜思 "Night Thoughts"
作者：李白 Author: Li Bai

床前明月光 A bed, I see a silver light,
疑是地上霜 I wonder if it's frost aground.
举头望明月 Looking up, I find the moon bright;
低头思故乡 Bowing, in homesickness I'm drowned.

"Night Thoughts" is a famous Chinese poetry by Li Bai.
The poetry talks about the emotion of homesickness: the light from the moon makes the author feeling lonely in a strange place.

A lightful ship billowing in the sky

Notre Dame du Haut: exterior and interior views

The Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France, is a pilgrimage chapel, designed by
Le Corbusier in 1954.
It stands, all in concrete, above the town on the top of a wooded hill, white and reflective, visible from miles away, with its aerodynamic tower, its “natural” shapes and wave-curved roof cutting into the sky beyond.
Above the plain altar, the east wall is punctuated by several pinhole-windows and by a single substantial window with the Madonna and Child in silhouette. In the interior, the spaces left between the wall and roof, as well as asymmetric light from the wall openings serve to further reinforce the sacral nature of the space and buttress the relationship of the building with its surroundings.

A war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness

"The Last Judgement" by Viktor Vasnetsov

The "War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness" is a manual for military organization and strategy that was discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls (a collection of 972 documents, including texts from the Hebrew Bible). These scrolls contain an apocalyptic prophecy of a war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness.

The war is first described as an attack by the Sons of Light against those who violate the divine covenant. In the end, all of Darkness is to be destroyed and Light will live in peace for all eternity.

Stamps

A 2010 stamp showing a lightbulb

The theme of "light" occurres in postage stamps mainly related to lamps and light sources.

A strange thing called 'lightbulb'

In this scene from "Wall-E", a computer-animated film produced by Pixar Animation Studios, Wall-E shows to Eve his favourite things, especially a lightbulb. In her hand the lightbulb lights up.

Light collage

"Peaceable Kingdom" by Austine Wood Comarow

Austine Wood Comarow started working in her original polarized light art medium in 1967.
She creates interactive and kinetic or morphing figurative images using a combination of polarized filters and special birefringent materials. When displayed in special kinetic light boxes they change in ways invocative of passing time: a sun setting, seasons change, people age.
The remarkable art requires cutting thousands of tiny pieces of clear cellulose and other optically active materials and laminating them onto a clear matrix such as acrylic or glass (polarized light collage). The resulting images can be displayed in motorized light boxes so they continually change, or in an interactive format so the viewer activates the image with a polarizing viewer.

Talking about the weather...

The weather project by Olafur Eliasson was installed at the London's Tate Modern in 2003 as part of the popular Unilever series. The installation filled the open space of the gallery's Turbine Hall.

This hugely popular exhibit explored that most British of obsessions, the weather. What looks like a complete Sun is actually only half a circle, reflected by a mirror running the entire length of the high ceiling.
The light Eliasson's created is really interesting: with monochromatic yellow light eliminating all colour and spurts of 'mist' adding to the atmosphere, the building was transformed into an ethereal and disconcerting beauty.
Generally used in street lighting, mono-frequency lamps emit light at such a narrow frequency that colours other than yellow and black are invisible, thus transforming the visual field around the sun into a vast duotone landscape. (From Tate Modern: About the installation)

Light as a 'medical instrument'

A view of the inner space: the corridor and the dining hall

Alvar Aalto's starting point for the design of the Paimio sanatorium in Southwest Finland, was to make the building itself a contributor to the healing process. He liked to call the building a "medical instrument".
For instance, light was considered a vehicle of positive feelings and particular attention was paid to the design of the inside, especially the patient bedrooms.
Aalto was able to bring natural light into the rooms and give the patients the feeling that they were in control of the space.

Also the colour scheme of the patients' rooms was related to light. Aalto had his own ideas about the ceilings of the patients' rooms, for example. "The ceiling of the room should be the colour of the sky", and because the ceiling was painted in darker tones, the lighting had to be arranged so that the part of the ceiling which reflected the light had to be painted in lighter tones.
Another example is the dining hall, that is designed with an eye on the natural lighting.

On the window side there is a double-height space, so that natural light filters into the farthest corner of the room and there are sun blinds outside to prevent glare.

Lighting without windows

Interior of the Pantheon, with ray of light from the center Oculus

On entering the door of the Pantheon (an Ancient Rome buiding), the effect you feel is meant to be overwhelming.

You suddenly find yourself in this huge empty space which causes vertigo and makes you feel tiny. This is how you were supposed to feel in front of the gods and anyone going in today can have the same sensation as the Romans did almost 2000 years ago.
At the centre of the dome's apex, there is a 9 meter diameter hole, the Oculus.
Since the Pantheon has no windows, the Oculus and the entry door are the only sources of light in the interior: the only light penetrates from above streaming down like a river of inner light. Towards midday, the rays coming through the Oculus are particularly intense.
The Oculus was also to let the smoke from sacred fires out. When it rains, it also rains in the Pantheon; the floor is slightly convex so the water flows away thanks to an effective drainage system.

A strange flickering light

The Valkyrior are warlike virgins, mounted upon horses and armed with helmets and spears. [...] When they ride forth on their errand, their armour sheds a strange flickering light, which flashes up over the northern skies, making what men call the "aurora borealis", or "Northern Lights".

("Bulfinch's Mythology", by Thomas Bulfinch, 1855)

Polar Auroras, also known as northern and southern (polar) lights, are natural light displays in the sky, particularly in the polar regions, and usually observed at night.
Typically the aurora appears either as a diffuse glow or as "curtains" that approximately extend in the east-west direction. At some times, they form "quiet arcs"; at others ("active aurora"), they evolve and change constantly.

A lightful day

Saint Lucy's day concert (Globen Luciakonsert)

At dawn on 13th December in Sweden thousands of young girls, dressed in white gowns, holding a lit candle and with a crown of electric candles on a wreath on their heads, bring light to the darkness of Swedish winter.

This is the "Lucia Festival", a 400 year-old tradition, played out in churches, schools, hospitals and workplaces around the country. Saint Lucy's day is so important that Christmas would not be Christmas in Scandinavia without it.