it’s true. it is. see this:

http://www.gothamist.com/archives/2004/05/26/fultonstreettransitcenterdesign_unveiled.php

… bringing light down to the people underground. as far as that’s concerned, I’m all for it. I heart light. I moved into this apartment specifically because it had better light then my last, and was therefore a less depressing place to live. a large proportion of the entries for the WTC memorial had “light” in the title:

http://www.wtcsitememorial.org/finalists.html

… that’s only a link to the finalists, I can’t find the full list, but I read some new yorker piece that talked about the preponderance of the word “light” up in there.

so yeah I reiterate: that’s great. I love light. I turn lights on. I spend time in light. I rarely cross the street unless I absolutely need to, but I will gratuitously cross for good light. the only reason I want to draw any attention to this is because the word “light” is starting to be thrown around the same way the word “space” was once cavalierishly brandished.

I bet you raise the concept of ‘space’ with my new favorite person jane jacobs, and you run the risk of having her spit on your shoes. she says that the absurd belief in excessive open space as an unquestionably positive and uplifting attribute among urban planners is what invalidated the concept of La Ville Radieuse, and the countless project tower systems that are its warped descendants. I’m inclined to agree with this point of view (nay, I made similar propisitions in some of the less bullshitty papers I wrote in school)… but I have to note that the manner in which the urban and town planners that jacobs so reviled when she wrote “the death and life of great american cities” tossed around the word “space” as many people today casually talk of “light”.

jacobs, see, says that planners were like, “this project housing system is AWESOME!!! see how much SPACE it has?!??! this is totally going to fix west harlem fo’real” and left things at that. they failed completely to consider the minutia of their designs, content to copy and paste the same building over and over again, confident that the buffer of space they’d given it made it a more than adequate place to live. well they were gravely mistaken, and if you’re at all curious as to why you should read the fucking book, fo’sho.

anyway yeah. I’m not talking shit about anything lighty right now (cuz yes I too love dr. calatrava’s gorgeous new light-enriched PATH station plans, especially after that last metropolis article talking about him wandering around grand central talking about how totally awesome everything therein is) but yeah I just wanna be like, maybe cautious steps should be taken as regards the “light conquers all” approach. it wierdly pains me to say this, cuz like I said, I love me some light. but who’s to say? it could get over-the-top and perverted, and the next thing you know its 2060 and otherwise intelligent architects won’t put any decent windows anywhere cuz of backlash against some impending postmodern light OD.

I dunno. I had 2 (two!) cupcakes before typing this whole light thing up so I might very well be mentally retarded. do pardon me.

-fish

… some of the comments on that gothamist article I linked to do in fact indicate that other people think the new fulton street transit station is butt. so, erm, there. yes!

-fish

this is kind of tangental, but I recall a sort of microversion of the whole “space as universal salve” rise-and-fall during the dotcom boom. all the dotcom spots I worked at, and many I saw or heard of, eschewed traditional offices for big open spaces littered with desks. “look at how awesome and collaborative it is! we all get along, right guys?!?!?” was the message. and pretty much every single time, people got seriously annoyed about the lack of privacy, with bosses constantly looking over shoulders and the like. this, in fact, was how I developed the habit of working extra-late: I could only really knock out the work without any other irritating fuckers around. it’s not too huge a leap to see that that sort of unease contributed to the downward spiral of the dotcom culture/economy.

-fish

jane jacobs rocks. if you like here and don’t know some off these you will be pleasantly surprised.

1. Gaston Bachelard, The poetics of space
2. yi fu tuan: space and place
3. Kevin Lynch: Images of the City
4. Juhani Palasmaa: eyes of the skin

As for light:
http://www.targetti.com/arte.asp?section=1&nome=Art%20Light%20Collection

yep, that’ll do pig.

s

oh yeah:
http://www.selektion.com/members/wollscheid/default.htm
http://www.selektion.com/members/steiger/d.htm
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/eliasson/
http://www.olafureliasson.net/press/works/works.html
eat that.

what you’re describing seems to parallel the evolutionary path of physics. in classic physics you have space (and time) as an absolute entity. in the turn of the century that model was dropped for a relativistic model. now we have the light as the invariant.

i have a hunch that the only reason physicists now think of light as invariant is because of the phenomenology of sight. light is the constant because we *look* at the universe and try to make sense of it.

imho, everything is relative because everything is connected.

-z

YEAH!!! like that lauren hill song, “everything is everything”. duuude.

-fish