Light in Architecture

twolight and geography

Opposite pagePeine de los vientos (The Wind Comb), sculpture, San Sebastián, 1977, by Eduardo Chillida.

Place [topos] is thought to be something that is both important and hard to grasp.

– Aristotle, Physics, Book IV

Architecture and Orientation

From the Neolithic stone rings at Stonehenge on Wiltshire’s Salisbury Plain to the great pre-Columbian structures at Teotihuacán in Mexico, from the Temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak in Egypt to the 15th-century caves at Sacromonte in Spain, architecture has always been oriented around the light of the sun. The English words “orient” and “orientation” are, in fact, derived from the Latin ...