James Corner on landscape and light

    A landscape is ten thousand landscapes, one for each of the ten thousand ways light reveals it in the course of a day and the year. Destroy a landscape for development and the loss is not one; it is ten thousand. Now, what James Corner writes about designed landscapes applies to wilderness landscapes:

    Great landscapes –- through ground modulation, plantings, water bodies, and other designed elements –- capture and reveal local light in new and transformative ways. It is not just that light and shadow are showcasing the landscape, but more that the landscape is actualizing light itself, rendering light in new ways, light that would be immaterial without a surface –- or field of textures –- to make it visible in a particular way.
    One of the most exciting aspects of lighting and landscape is that they are both subject to the passages of time: early-morning dawn colors the land in a particular way, often with very striking colors, shortening shadows and increasing clarity. The morning is very different from midday, which tends to wash things out; dawn is echoed again, albeit differently, with the late afternoon’s lengthening shadows, warm sunset tones, and the atmospheric, thickening hues of dusk. Even nighttime has a certain character of light –- dim, even dark, but once the eyes have adjusted, there is just enough definition to make out blackened forms and space.

    (Quoted from page 127 of Architectural Lighting: Designing with Light and Space, by Hervé Descottes, with Cecilia Ramos. Princeton Architectural Press, 2011.)

    For an earlier Saunterer post on how light multiplies landscape, about Claude Monet’s painting of haystacks over the seasons, click here.
   
    For a brief biography of James Corner, click here. For images of or relating to James Corner, click here.
    For a brief biography of Hervé Descottes, click here. For images of or relating to Hervé Descottes, click here.
    For a brief biography of Cecilia E. Ramos, click here.