We turn to Ernst Cassirer’s persuasive argument, “side by side with logical or scientific language, there is a language of poetic imagination.” This studio leans into this assertion.  An appreciation of the poetics of light comes from a deep examination of the science behind it.  The science of light is the precise study and understanding of the movement of the sun in the sky.  The earth’s axis of orientation towards the sun as well as its cyclic movement around it are what animate our experience of it. 

These truths make it both a temporal and a spatial phenomenon. Its presence changes as much from minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, season to season as it does from one place to another. When speaking of natural light in a scientific sense, we talk of time of day and month, solstice and equinox as well as characteristics of the sun’s path in the sky like azimuth and altitude and climate to fully understand the lighting conditions and the atmosphere of a particular place.

With this deep understanding of the science of light we have a foundation from which we can frame the design process.  Architecture is a technology that we can tune so that the space can resonate more precisely with our bodies’ circadian rhythms and the natural world around us.