Learning of Light
“The sun never knew how great it was until it hit the side of a building,” Louis I. Kahn
I’m sitting in the living room writing as a late afternoon glow is warming the room.
Earlier I had closed the laptop and went walking with the beast who knows no bounds, particularly about spending time outdoors. Layla had been begging with her eyes for the past hour. Any time the laptop is closed, she checks in case it portends a walk. She’s not an ill-mannered creature, but needy when it comes to being outside.
I often wonder how much human restraint of our canine friends feels to them like an imposed sacrifice. In Layla’s case it might well be. Huskies enjoy human companionship, but they’re not yellow labs. They still carry that wild instinct passed down from their canid ancestors. In any case, we’re now returned and inside where we started; she’s planted herself against my leg, enjoying this late gift of light.
Designing the renovation of our house, the thorniest design problem confronting me was how to bring light into the main living-dining area, which faces northwest–toward the lake and away from the sun. Natural light is a gift, and I didn’t intend squandering just because the house was oriented wrong. It took some head scratching–another half-story taller–and more glass–but the problem became the design parti.
By summer when the trees are fully leafed out, the lower angled morning and afternoon sunlight is blocked. However, from late fall into spring, the sunlight strikes the high clerestory windows facing southeast and southwest, bouncing past the overhead loft and down into the living room. The light fills the room. There would be more width in the office loft if it spanned the full width of the living room below. We also wouldn’t have sunlight streaming into both rooms on winter days.
House in winter—photo by William E. Evans, © 2017
…and the same view in fall colors
We live at 38° latitude in what’s termed a humid, subtropical climate, i.e. long, hot and humid summers. The best orientation for a primary façade with windows is due south, allowing the easiest control of direct sunlight by overhangs, window awnings and other shade devices. At noon, the sun at the summer solstice, June 22, is closest to vertical to the ground, and is most easily shaded. At its lowest on December 22, the sun here is at around 35 degrees to the ground at its zenith, meaning it enters deeper into rooms when you most want it.
So if you picture a house as a block of wood, turning its primary orientation away from due south, either toward east or west, more of the lower angled sun is let in. When your principle facades face southwest and northwest, as in our case, you have the worst conditions. Our southwest façade faces our neighbor, so the problem was solved by limiting the extent of the windows. The northwest façade, as previously mentioned, is toward the view we paid most to have, namely the lake. Opening the house to the lake view lets in soft northern light, and across the water, views of golden-red clouds at sunset.
Altogether natural light in all seasons and in all weather.
The obvious way to expand the living, dining and kitchen spaces (which weren’t much larger than some townhouses) would have been to build directly behind the preexisting house, pushing into the larger part of the back yard. But it also would have meant burying the existing rooms behind the addition, keeping them from direct views of the lake–and trading the sunlight for more space.
Instead, I shifted the bulk of the addition to the side of the original house, so the original rooms could keep their light and view. It also nearly doubled the rooms with view of the lake; though that’s but a secondary benefit.
It was a trick to stay within the zoning setbacks, but the diagonally running lake edge that forms our backyard worked in our favor. By zoning, this boundary is classified as a side yard, allowing us to come within fifteen feet of the water (verses thirty-five feet for a rear yard setback). We paid for a full property survey that I used as the base computer file for my drawings, then second and third wall checks to make sure we stayed outside of the setback. We clear the setback by about three inches.
It was worth the effort. From fall to spring, when the sun indirectly fills these rooms, the light makes the rooms come alive. And when there’s ice covering the lake, with snow laid on top, the brilliant light almost calls for sunglasses.
And the office loft where D spends her working hours has views toward the front yard and the rear view of the lake, views across the cove to our neighbors, and the high clerestory windows for bountiful natural light.
Natural Light and View
Either you figure a way to provide both light and view, or the design parti fails, regardless of what other marvelous gestures and extravagances you may provide the dwellers. It’s that fundamental. I learned of light not all at once and from a not expected source.
Lou Kahn I knew of by reputation, though I never expected meeting him. If there ever was a proselytizer of sunlight, Kahn was.
To begin with, at Clemson I’d been introduced to the subject’s mechanics, solar orientation, physics of light, visual and non-visual light ranges, heat gain, glass technology, differences between natural and manmade light. I even got hold of a sun angle calculator–a slide rule-like device giving you sun angles at specific times of the year, manual of course, since computer-aided design (CAD) was still on the horizon. Clemson’s strength in education was more in the engineering of buildings and less in the aesthetics.
I graduated from Clemson in the summer of ‘71–working the night shift at the JP Stevens textile mill nearby–and making up the two engineering classes I’d missed. I would walk out of that lesser version of Mordor early mornings to greet the sun after a night breathing toluene and paint fumes and working a 400 ° furnace some two hundred feet in length. We printed continuous runs of cotton sheets at that non-unionized plant, and when the sheet leads tore, some unlucky person got to crawl inside that oven to find it, drag it through all the rollers and reset it before the line could start up again. I nearly lost a finger to the take-up rollers at the end of the line when an idiot started the line before telling anyone. After visiting the health clinic, I got a free ride the next evening to the plant to sit there doing nothing for eight hours with my right hand swathed in bandages so the plant manager could claim no work days had been lost to injuries.
This same plant later had two union organizers killed in a gas explosion. They never succeeded in unionizing it. Whoever JP Stevens was, there’s a special place in hell for him and his kin.
My roommate, Lewis, graduated on time–winning one of the class awards. He was one of our class’s best designers and deserved the honor. With summer school yet ahead of me, I attended the convocation held at the school of architecture because Lou Kahn was the scheduled speaker. Clemson was as far from any architectural center as it could be, stuck in the southern Blue Ridge foothills, so getting Kahn to speak must have taken an effort by Dean McClure.
Lou Kahn had begun his architectural career late in life. He’d taught architecture, first at Yale and later at the University of Pennsylvania. My first year at Yale, Kahn was a visiting critic for a 3rd-year studio, shortly before he died. His first landmark building was an addition to the Yale Museum of Art–just across the street from the School of Architecture. His Yale Center for British Art was being built when I was at Yale–and our structural professor used its concrete frame in his lectures.
The School of Architecture’s graduation ceremony was held in the sculpture courtyard of the earlier art museum. My sister Janet had driven our mother from South Carolina to witness the amazing event–no one could believe I’d made it.
At Yale I was as surrounded by great architecture, including Kahn’s, as I’d missed it at Clemson.
Kahn wasn’t a gifted speaker by pedagogical standards. Born in Estonia and living there until he was five when his family immigrated, his accent stayed with him. Add to this, his years teaching architecture had led him to an abstraction-laden way of discussing architecture.
He was a diminutive man with thick glasses making him seem slightly puzzled, and a badly scarred face from a childhood accident.
Perhaps it was the formality of the affair, but my takeaway from his speech was middling to eh? However, it was announced that he would attend a later evening bull session at a student’s house off campus. On a whim, I decided to go, expecting to hear a similar patter, comments by our professors, a few from vocal students, drink some beer and leave.
The house was another family residence subdivided into apartments, and the living room the bull session was held in had been cleared of furniture–to accommodate the crowd?–because it was student housing and students are poor?–dunno. Though by the time I arrived, Kahn was sitting in the room’s only chair holding a beer someone had brought him, with students and professors shadowed in a semicircle around him.
Three hours later, I walked out of the house in a daze.
Lou Kahn was a philosopher by training and a preacher by his heart. And it took the entire three hours for him to explain his philosophy of architecture. The earlier commencement speech was at best a warmup. I don’t think he ever took more than a sip from the beer he held the entire time, and there were next to no questions, comments, observations by anyone else in the room.
Of all the architectural lectures I’ve listened to in my life, Kahn’s was the only one that was accompanied by zero slides, images, drawing, nothing. Just Kahn’s word images. In three hours, I don’t recall ever missing their lack. And I recall thinking that I needed to go to graduate school and become an architect for real.
Walking away, I asked Lewis what he thought, and he just shook his head. Lewis wasn’t a person easily impressed, but that evening Lou Kahn succeeded in impressing us both.
I’d started at Clemson, passed the architectural aptitude test required for acceptance into the program, asking obvious questions–obvious to me–struggled through the first two years but grimly hung on. By third year I’d come on some basic ideas and learned the trick of visualizing how a building might best fit its site, and how individual spaces within fit with each other. Once I could visualize it, I could draw it.
By fourth year I’d reached the front ranks with my design projects. By fourth year, I’d also become friends with Lewis, Frank, Bob and others who were doing as well or better. We’d started with a class of 150 freshmen plus 3 or 4 women. We graduated as a class of 26 and no women. Some attrition was an intentional ‘thinning the herd,’ some were students realizing they were in the wrong major, and some who couldn’t cut the math and long studio hours. It was no exaggeration; we lived in the studio.
By graduation, I was facing a dilemma–should I continue in architecture, or move toward urban planning–following Lewis’s lead. Architecture, I was learning, was a game for rich folk, which I certainly was not. A later classmate at Yale, Andrés Duany, advised, “marry an heiress,” and I didn’t listen.
One needed contacts in the profession, again which I didn’t have, and the idea of finding a practice in conservative South Carolina held no appeal. Urban planning offered a path to a career in the civil service–I thought–improving the built environment and countering the destruction of the natural environment. These were things I’d learned to see as more important than designing pretty corporate buildings and vacation houses for millionaires.
Whatever else was wrong with students in the 60s and 70s, we were carrying banners for peace, equality and a better world. At the least as an observer, I stood in those ranks.
During that time, I hooked up with Lewis to rent a basement apartment on North Clemson Avenue; the back half of the apartment was buried in the ground. Lewis lined up a third classmate, Bob, to join us. We each paid $20/month rent, which gives an idea of what the joint looked like. I took a former screened porch that had been glassed in at one point. Beautiful sunlight in the morning–and freezing cold in the winter since the room had no heat.
Bob found a job for me joining him to work on an English professor’s house. The professor, wife and two sons were living in the unfinished garage using a two-burner electric burner plus a toaster oven and space heaters. We were doing finish carpentry in the main house until I landed a job with one of my former architecture professors doing his drafting. After hours I worked on making my school portfolio and doing sketched elevations marketing the houses he’d designed for Hilton Head that hadn’t sold. After sketching the same elevation several times, I began to make the woman posing by the front door with increasingly smaller bikinis. Hilton Head was a beach community, see?
As regards the portfolio, buying a leather-bound portfolio book and paying for dry-mounting photographic reproductions held little appeal for my slim budget, so I took a trick from presentations I’d done at Clemson, bought thin sheets of chipboard (cardboard) cut them with an X-ACTO knife into 8x10 sheets and used them to mount the images. Long evenings were spent drawing and mounting images. Punching holes for ring binders, then making a box of matching chipboard. Likely it was Dr. Cooledge’s recommendation and not the portfolio that let me sneak into Yale. I’d aced his last architectural history exam, answering the single essay question he’d posed.
Clemson had told me I needed a year of architectural experience before returning for grad school. Not expecting to hear back from Yale, I packed my bags and moved to Atlanta for work. I found a job running the blueprint machines at a large Atlanta firm, and a cheap room in an old Decatur house, then a rundown part of town where one roommate returned home from Kentucky with bales of wild marijuana, aka hemp. The hemp had been cultivated during World War II, and grew like a weed. It was pretty lame far as getting high was concerned–because it was hemp... same genus different plant.
I felt sure I’d be busted along with him–the entire house would be. He brought me in to show off how he’d it set up like a shrine arranged around the former dining room fireplace. Like he was planning to pray to it? Dunno. At work one day, my mother called, said she’d gotten an acceptance letter from Yale. So before I could be busted along with the others in the house, I packed my VW Bug, drove back home to Sumter, repacked and headed for New Haven for two heady years of hanging with big time architects.
Next time you’re in the new terminal at National Airport, at the south end of the concourse is a window sculpture by Kent Bloomer. He taught the first year architecture students at Yale along with Charlie Moore. Absent sunlight, the art would only be a pattern in metal. In sunlight, the metal glows.
“National Airport… called for the installation of 30 pieces of art... Chosen from a pool of 350 artists, the Bloomer Studio designed and fabricated a leafy trellis that sprouts from metal members along an expansive glass wall at one end of the airport. Bloomer’s hand-hammered aluminum leaves attach to stems and larger trunks, creating a flowing and masterful design that reaches up to the ceiling. The leaves also neatly swing out on hinged frames to facilitate cleaning the glass wall. The unpainted aluminum forms filter and reflect sunlight, creating patterns of light and dark that comfort and entertain travelers on their way to and from flights.”
So natural light. It varies from country to country, region to region. The U.S. southwest has light nothing like in the east of the country. And whether the lack of winter sunlight plays into a type of depression, it’s certainly not uplifting to wake in the morning to half light from an overcast sky.
I’d always heard the light in the Greek isles was brilliant, and when we got there decades later, it was proved right.
Santorini—photo by William E Evans, © 2014
Santorini—photo by William E Evans, © 2014
"You say to a brick, 'What do you want, brick?' And brick says to you, 'I like an arch.' And you say to brick, 'Look, I want one, too, but arches are expensive and I can use a concrete lintel.' And then you say: 'What do you think of that, brick?' Brick says: 'I like an arch.' "
Louis I Kahn