helps you understand the work of Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa, which is filled with layered details and ornamentation that give his surfaces so much richness. He was working from what he had known and experienced, and the results are wonderful. I see light everywhere now, and I try to savor the moments when I see it doing something special. Those moments are fleeting and easy to lose — like love and happiness, or the feeling of contentment — and they are the reward of observation, quiet and usually personal. However, in my professional career, I’ve spent so much time orienting buildings to the north to mitigate heat gain and the damning effects of direct light that I’ve denied myself, and my clients, the drama of light moving around a room or through a space. Gone are the slashing blades of light cutting beautifully through a room, as seen in the photos by Ezra Stoller. It’s smart design, but it’s sad — we have really lost something in our uniformly illuminated spaces with their flat, never-changing light. A few years ago, I went to New York with my son Max, and, as we made the rounds of many well-known buildings, including a preponderance of museums, I never failed to point out to him the light coming into the spaces. As the child of an architect, he is aware of buildings, and he knows when I am moved by them. He has seen me cry more than once when something
touched me — a beautiful space or a painting. We visited the Erol Beker Chapel of the Good Shepherd below St. Peter’s Church, which shares
The aqueous lighting of Venice is a product of daylight reflected and refracted by the lagoon; the buildings are lit from below as well as from above. a site with the Citicorp Tower, and went to see the Louise Nevelson sculptures that adorn the walls of the space. It was a perfect time of day; the light came down into the room, which was located well below the street, with a brilliance and intensity I had never seen before. The walls were alive, with light animating and reflecting from Nevelson’s pieces, and the small flakes of gold accenting the sculptures were sparkling and bright, intensifying the experience. Sometimes you are just in the perfect place and time for an epiphany, and you know you will never see it again no matter how hard you search for it. You have found the light, and you know it’s there, and it’s very, very good. Michael Malone, AIA, is the founding principal of Michael Malone Architects in Dallas.
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standing the phenomenon of the aqueous light in Venice provides insight into the architecture of Carlo Scarpa. His collage-like use of materials is best understood as part of an illuminated mosaic. The Olivetti Showroom in the Piazza San Marco is perhaps Scarpa’s most loving homage to his birthplace. This page No essay of
the modern movement more succinctly illustrates the potential of light to transform space than Le Corbusier’s Chapelle Notre-Dame-duHaut in Ronchamp. The south wall, with its myriad of buttress windows, is an architectural essay in mystery.
7/8 2013
Texas Architect 23