Light in Architecture by Elisa Valero Ramos

Author:Elisa Valero Ramos [Elisa Valero Ramos]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: RIBA Publishing
Published: 2019-08-08T16:00:00+00:00

The glass pavilion created by Taut for the Deutsche Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne materialised the poet’s fantasies. It has a tall, geodesic-style dome in the form of a crystalline object – although, as day dawned on it and it journeyed “out of darkness” it lost the intensity of its intended lighting effects and became simply a bright space.

Figure 5.9 The Seagram Building, New York, 1956–8, by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Skyscrapers: The New Cathedrals

It was German modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the architect of transparency, who succeeded in putting the fantasies of the expressionists into practice in architectural terms. His model of the Friedrichstrasse Office Building, a proposed skyscraper made entirely of glass and steel, is unbuilt yet nevertheless one of the most important structures in 20th century architecture in terms of its subsequent influence. Mies van der Rohe put forward totally lucid formulas in order to afford glass an appropriate setting in the new skyscraper. The building produced in this way would shine with its own light at night, but would be closed and opaque in sunlight, throwing its shadow on the modern city. The skyscrapers designed by Mies in the 1920s, the Friedrichstrasse model and the Seagram Building in New York (1956–8) all surge upwards like mineral crystals with complex reflecting surfaces. In a manner reminiscent of the 13th-century gothic cathedrals, they, too, generated an enveloping inner light that was independent of the movement of the sun.

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