When I first thought of the topic of this year’s school magazine I tried to find a connection between the metaphor that’s hiding behind the given phrase and how I can find it in the colloquial background in which we live and so I automatically thought of writing about architecture and the essential meaning of light and shadow in it.
Firstly, I’d like to remind everyone that architecture is not just a concept about “how to construct a plausible building in which people should adapt,” but a deep engagement in the metaphysical question of the self and the world, interiority and exteriority, light and shadows, asymmetry and geometry and so on. Architecture molds itself on the personality of people, on their feelings and needs and it tries to understand them and to make a correlation between them and the world we live in and all these steps are totally essential to follow in architecture, because we aren’t made to live in a fabricated dream world, where everything that’s around us is just a ‘paper town.’ What’s a paper town? Well, it’s a fragile projection of our imagination, which is made to be used as an industrial product and not to be related in any way to people’s needs and emotions.
Every building is like a living organism, in my opinion, and in which light and shadows bring a significant contribution to the authenticity of the building. They both have different meanings and bring specific consequences to a construction: the light shows the personal life of the people and it makes the space be more dramatic, but the shadows dim the sharpness of vision, make depth and distance ambiguous and provide the space with more intimacy. We can also see the subtle connection between light and shadows and the principle of Yin & Yang and in this way, we can divide the buildings into two categories, according to two different types of people: the ones who prefer big, open rooms full of light and who like to show off their extrovert side in a construction that needs to be sincere and free-spoken and the ones who prefer the spaces to be darker, more mysterious, thus showing off their introvert part. In this way, we can identify a correlation between the types of people and the building they live in. But one thing I’m sure of is that we cannot say which of these two characteristics are better, because they are both, after all, just a reflection of our feelings and emotions. I know it sounds a little selfish, but in the end, this world is nothing more than just a projection of our thoughts in which we play the lead role.
Well, this is my vision of buildings in correlation with light and shadows, and I openly admit that to me it’s not just about the theoretical part, but also about the metaphor that’s hidden behind.
Szeker Noela, 11th E
Notre-Dame cathedral
light plays an essential role in every Gothic cathedral, because it is correlated to the idea that ‘light is associated with God’
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