formless circumstance

Published in Harvard Urban Review 2023 Issue: Block Party

Full publication here

Davidson Norris practices as a daylight architect and currently teaches at Columbia University GSAPP. This interview focuses on light as a key driver in urban experience and definition which, particularly in the city that he lives in, is laid out in blocks.

Zoom: Your meeting attendees are waiting!

The gentleman was three minutes early. The 11 second start-up time stretched as I rehearsed the questions on a topic that seemed too poetic or scientific to enunciate in the urban planning and design language. With the job title Daylight Architect, Davidson Norris appears onscreen, smiling at the daylit trays behind me, to articulate the light and its relationship to spatial design and placemaking.

Light has a transcendent effect on space that it’s almost overlooked in architecture and urban design because of its difficulty to be articulated in drawing or words. Yet you choose to include it in your occupation.

DN: Yes, I think you create architectural space without an understanding of light, but you cannot create architectural place without understanding light, and that’s the big difference. I think light is, along with a series of other environmental forces, the defining quality of place.

In your observations, how has the light of place shaped different urban settings?

DN: Take New York where I live, the light of place is the way to define it and it says that. You know, starting in the 16th century with the inhabitation of the island of Manhattan by Dutch settlers, there was a gradual development of an understanding of the light resources that were available to the city as it expanded. It expanded significantly in the 19th century and more significantly in the 20th century. Some of that understanding is about that original light that expresses itself in the Hudson River Valley.

Early in the morning, the light shines on the on the face of the palisade across the river, setting out in over what is now New Jersey. Then it sparkles off the water and then penetrates the city.

Even now, with the buildup of the city, we continue to articulate New York through New York light by understanding how the primeval light resource was then used in various capacities.

That buildup of city blocks must have an effect of the light then. How has that light evolved to be today?

DN: Light was available to you as you looked horizontally. The difference now is how that light continues to be available. You find that lateral light if you look up, which New Yorkers never do, so it is not readily available. With the Manhattan grid, that light reveals itself at the cross streets. However, no one is paying attention and so one can argue that New York City has basically occluded the traditional light resources from the modern-day experience. And so now the interpretation of the light of place is the filtration of that primeval light by the fabric of New York City.

Given how a city block accommodates multiple buildings within it, the materials begin to transcribe itself onto the light. What is the quality of light that is filtered by the blocks of Manhattan?

DN: At the street level, where the light is a public experience, what's available to you is light that has been multiplied and reflected, possibly thousands of times off different building surfaces before it gets down to you. That photon moves down and amalgamate. So, by the time it is delivered to the street, you're bathed in light.

Now, it's this wonderful kind of sense of you being embraced by the very diffused and often blue light – two of the signature qualities of New York City's light of place which comes from the buildup of the grid itself.

How does the New York lumen drive the urban experience?

The grid and its orientation are critical to the experience, certainly of evanescent light.

If you live on the South side of a street, you're not going to get a lot of light in through your North window. And it'll mostly be diffused light. But you're able to look out your window and see the light play on the north side of the street. So, your connection to the sunlight is not one that's interior to your apartment, but one that's external.

Outside, there's a brief time every day when the Sun is literally right on axis with the avenue, and it blazes all the way up. Then it gradually illuminates the east side and approaches the street and migrates up onto the West side.

There's a whole articulation of the sun's path. In some ancient cities, there were always celebrations of light of when it was – for instance, if the city was on axis with the sunrise during solstice, or the sunset on the equinox. As much as these are very ancient traditions, it is surprising that every year, particularly in late May when the Sun sets right on axis with the streets, people go out on the streets and they and they celebrate what's called Manhattanhenge. And it has to do with the sort of magic that occurs when the sun is setting. That beautiful red light is a cosmic experience that illuminates our connection to the mother star. The way it happens in New York reminds us of being part of a larger ordered system vaster than the urban parameters obscured by congregated blocks.

Now, if you asked me whether I would ever expect New Yorkers to gather and celebrate that, I would say no. They're just too busy and too otherwise occupied. But there you are. People go out on the street. They stop traffic. They all hold up their phones and take a picture of the of the sun setting in the West in this moment of atmospheric silence.

Daily, the sky is brought down because our eyes are always looking down and the streets covered with a very thin mirror of water. As a designer, I've often thought that it would be wonderful to do something on a New York City sidewalk so you can become more aware of that. Then you would understand as you walk across it that you're not walking on a sidewalk, you're walking on the sky.

It's not just a matter of what happens on the ground plane, but also how these tall buildings relate to the often-overcast sky as it descends on the city. The clouds drop and suddenly the skyscrapers disappear up into the fog. Or how New York City looks in a snowfall – everything is brilliant. Everything is a crystal reflecting light and white.

For a city that never sleeps, what happens at night?

Our vision changes as a function of the availability of light. In the day, it's photopic vision, which essentially is a response to an abundant light. At night, it's scotopic vision where color has been eliminated and we see everything in whites and blacks and grays. But there's a moment in between those when the vision is called mesopic.

In the city, it is rare to go through the mesopic period without the intervention of electric light. And so, I think it's almost impossible to find places in New York where you can experience rooftops are actually pretty good in terms of light balance. Because they get rid of the street light and the light is dictated by buildings out there that are partially or fully illuminated as they shift from the daytime into the nighttime.

It is interesting to observe the mesopic period and think about ways where the qualities of light that are specific to it so we could better articulate in our architecture and visual memory of a city.

One of the places where I think you can experience great mesopic light is Yankee Stadium. It's an extraordinary space to watch. The games are usually played in the afternoon so what you experience then is the setting sun and these huge shadows that the stadium then cast out onto the playing field, simply a beautiful abstract platonic space. You see this large-scale interaction of shadow and light which also then plays out in terms of your vision. It’s shifting from one that is more attuned to the full spectrum of light in the day to the scotopic gray vision of the night.

Scaling down to the building block, how do architecture and people inhabit the New York light?

DN: Well in Soho, in this old industrial building I’m in, all the buildings surrounding us are basically the same height at five stories. They're five commercial stories so they generally tend to be higher than residential buildings. This is a building that was built before electric light was available. There was probably gas light available to illuminate these industrial spaces, which are basically 30 feet wide and 100 feet deep, and windows on both ends.

The original architects understood, given the width of the street and the height of the buildings that it made sense to apportion the light based on what floor you were on. The result was that the top floor has very small windows. The windows on the top floor maybe only six feet high because they have easy access to the sky above. I’m on the third floor, so to get the same kind of light on this floor from the windows in the front and the windows in the back. Our windows are 4’ by 8’. And then if you go down to the ground floor the windows are all 4’ by 14’. The height of the windows as the elevation decreased. This was for providing enough lights so that workers could do what they had to do in here. They clearly understood that the light was going to be brought in by the windows at the front and end of the building. So, if an art historian looked at it and said “Oh, such a nice interpretation of Italianate, piano nobile proportioning of window sizes and stories,” – no, it had nothing to do with that. It had to do with needing more light down low than up above, so the windows changed.

Inside, there is, what's very, very rare in New York, a South-facing window. I can look out that and see the sky. I used to be able to see the World Trade Center and now I can see is the new Herzog and De Meuron tower that is off to the South. The view is a microcosm which represents the life of New York. Most of the day, it's atmospheric silence in here. The shadowless diffused light is intercepted when the sun swings around and lines up with this back alley in the south and come burning through here and now. In the winter, the sun is so low that the beam of sunlight ends up back behind me over in the corner there. Sometimes it’s so bright you have to you have to pull the shades.

It's this wonderful kind of intervention of bright light that occurs that occurs just for a brief time, maybe half an hour. What I like about the light here is what I'm simply transposing to the city of New York. If you have good light in New York City, you have some balance between atmospheric silence and evanescence. And that keeps you that keeps you from going crazy.

Closing comment?

I don't think you can really establish a place without a very deep understanding of what light is, and then how it is that we as architects can articulate it meaningfully, not just for us, but for people.

Thank you for your time, Professor. It’s been delightful.

Jialei TangJuly 15, 2023Comment