The Architecture of Shadows (1)

If, as architect Sverre Fehn has suggested, the creation of a shadow constitutes the origin of place, then how does this interplay between the place of shadows and the openness of light form a dialectics of memory? Beginning from the earth, the darkness of the built environment constitutes both a break and an opening in the landscape. With this double opening-break, the landscape becomes bordered through the production of difference, articulated through the role the shadow plays in demarcating territory.

Instead of viewing this relation between shadows and light as a transitional phase, in which shadowed place eventually gives rise to the clarity of light, let us think of the relation as the formation of a dialectic between presence/absence, inside/out, and process/stasis. Here, negativity and positivity appear as shifting perspectives, spatial patterns which reach a limit and then disperse. The movement of shadows carries with it the movement of place. As a result, places are created which have been marked by the movement of shadows in time. “By so reasoning,” so writes Amos Chang in his pleasing The Tao of Architecture, “we see that of two classrooms of the same capacity, the one which is continuously used on a one-hour basis probably needs more centralized location the one which is used, also continuously, one a two-hour basis” (p. 8).

For Chang, the void around which light and shadows revolve—“the negative in architectonic forms”—constitutes the dynamism of place. Given this emphasis on the void, predominately designated a source of topophobia in Western culture, a question emerges: to what extent does the formation of a shadow appear through the unformed void, thus conferring a presence on space? Note that the experience of a shadow modifies the distance of perception by bringing the shadowed-object into the unshadowed-space. A shadow occurs through the gesture of disjunction. The spectrality of the shadow is thus precisely the appearance of distance. Talk of the “shadowy other,” personified through the figure of the doppelganger, is not coincidental: otherness makes an appearance by diverging from the sense-perception of the un-shadowed present.

If a shadow is also its double, so invoking an inherently temporal dimension, then it deserves to be held apart from the perception of light. We are in the midst of the texture of surface, a texture comprised from the jagged, uneven unfolding of shadows, shades, and modulating terrains. Concerning the experience of this surface, Chang writes thus of rust: “Besides its contribution of settling dusty elements in its minute voids, rusticity has the power to pierce the sharp shining of light and reflects it in its partial area, making it fused with the shadows concurrently created and giving the surface a vibrating quality” (p. 15). Out of this wonderful passage, we gain sight of the temporality of shadows as resisting the classical notion of the void as a prism of inertia, but rather reaching above and below the erosion of material. If not the preservation of the thing-as-form, then the continuity of its evolving surface emerges as the fulfilment of an incomplete process.