Let there be light

Daylight is a public resource, says urban designer and light artist James Carpenter. But when we privatise that public resource – the way we do in buildings – we have an “reciprocal responsibility” to return light to the public realm.

James has built his career on installations that explore and enrich the play of light in architecture. He’s in Canberra this week to participate in the Design Canberra Festival and to explore how innovative design can create buildings that “re-engage people with qualities of light”.

When we look at light in nature, James argues, we are looking at “millions of surfaces that are illuminated over a dense field of vision”. The eye consolidates this very complex image into an understandable recognition of the space around us.

But most contemporary architecture is “monolithic” and without “volume”. James and his team work with multiple surfaces of light to “shape the skin” of a building, presenting a rich and engaging surface that reflects ever-changing moments of time.

James has spent the last 50 years thinking about light. He enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1968, with the plan to study architecture. But after being drawn to the sculpture studio, he met glass artist and a teacher at the school, Dale Chihuly. He graduated with a degree in sculpture in 1972, taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and spent a decade as a consultant to Corning Glass.

In 1979, he established James Carpenter Design Associates in New York, and has since worked on many major international projects – famed for their interplay between built form, glass and light – including the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Seven World Trade Centre in New York and the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin.

Many things interest James about light. “There’s the physics of light and then, at a more prosaic level, how we perceive light,” he explains.

“We don’t really know how big the universe is because the light hasn’t arrived yet. Some light falling on us today was generated billions of years ago.

“Light is so pervasive in our day-to-day lives that we tend to not acknowledge its complexity, nor the information or imagery it carries with us and presents to us,” he says.

Our monolithic buildings and monochrome streets can be transformed through “unusual encounters” with light in the public realm, he says.

One example is his installation at the Fulton Center in New York, a transportation and retail hub that opened in 2014. The station features the Sky Reflector-Net, a 25-metre-tall structure of steel cables and aluminium panels that drives light deep into the building.

“The art work we designed is optically engineered so when you look up, it brings the image of the sky down into the building. You see the movement of the clouds and the animation of the sky into the building itself. You can see the blue of the sky and the clouds in the surface of the sculptural work,” he explains.

People are often found sprawled on the station’s floor, looking up to observe the phenomena, he adds.

Closer to home, many of us have marveled at Luminous Threshold, which defines the gateway into Sydney’s Olympic complex. A sequence of five 23-metre-high masts, each topped with a stainless steel misting system, present an mutable display of light. On a sixth mast, a mirror system tracks the sun’s path throughout the day, reflecting the golden yellow light through clouds of mist.

James works to unlock these “often unobserved qualities” in the light around us, and to create an experience of richness and wonderment in our daily lives.

This is James’ first visit to Canberra, which was made possible through the generous support of the Australian National University School of Art and Design.

According to Richard Whiteley, the School’s Head of Glass, James “thinks about the fabric of a building in quite a different way to most architects and he integrates engineering solutions in a sculptural way”.

James “sensitises” our cities and the people within them to light. “He’s not just building architectural shapes,” Richard adds. “He’s thinking about how the materials he uses can evoke an experience.”

James Carpenter will be exploring light in the public realm in a free talk at the National Gallery of Australia on Tuesday 13 November. Bookings are essential.