Why architecture now plays its part in the natural sciences

摘要

Light has often been a key factor in assessing beauty in architecture -that of Le Corbusier's magnificently lit volumes or the silent light of Louis Kahn. Nature knows four seasons. "Architecture knows only two: shadow and light," said the Italian Rationalist architect Alberto Sartoris. Until the 1980s, architecture played with light as an inorganic material, a sculptural counterpoint to darkness, shaping forms and volumes, choreographing spatial sequences and revealed in all its splendour in the black and white photography of Tadao Ando and Robert Mapplethorpe.