Can Lis: Form and Performance

One of Utzon’s most important works is a house he designed for himself and his family near Petro Porto on the Spanish island of Majorca, off the Mediterranean coast near Barcelona.  The house is one of those extremely rare, successful essays in the conscious production of a vernacular building by a professional, and appropriately a significant example of Utzon’s understanding of sun and daylight.  Not so long ago, the production of (vernacular) buildings, the control of daylight, and thermal control were one and the same.  There were no mechanical or electrical means for providing visual or thermal comfort.  At this house, which Utzon called Can Lis, he developed a most interesting approach to daylighting, one which, in a vernacular manner, guided his design decisions throughout the project.

Utzon’s daylighting strategy at Can Lis recognizes three ideas. The first is that a little sunlight goes a long way.  For the most part, direct sun is visually uncomfortable and inefficient and the same is true thermally; it is typically a mistake to bring quantities of uncontrolled direct sun into a space.  Direct sun is fine if you are lazing on the seashore or enjoying a leisurely stroll.  But too much sun, even a little sun from the wrong direction, easily introduces glare and overheating to a building interior.  Utzon’s second idea was that views of sun-washed and daylight-washed surfaces and landscapes can bring the satisfaction of sunlight and a sense of the passage of the day into a space while minimizing the visual and thermal problems.  Seeing the unmistakable evidence of sun on a nearby surface or in the distance is a very effective substitute for being exposed to direct sun.  The third and crucial idea was Utzon’s recognition that in Spain the sun follows a relatively high arc through the southern sky (at least in comparison to his native Denmark) and therefore configuring and locating the house’s openings toward the horizon would minimize the attack of direct sun and maximize the intake of more desirable, diffused skylight.

Student Work

Work by Betty Shreve.  The images represent the entry, galleries, and circulation spaces designed for a proposed museum at the Alhambra in Granada, Spain.  The views here are physical models photographed in daylight.  The scale figures and artworks were added to the photos with Photoshop.

Student Work

Work by Jason Westhouse. Digital models depicting light from the west [bottom] and light from the northern sky [top].

Student Work

A project by Joel Kuzich. A digitally enhanced physical model, top and middle. A comparison of digital and physical models, in daylight, under studio light, and in digital daylight.

Student Work

A project by Christopher King. A digital study at the top and a physical model below.

Student Work

A project by Mohamad Hadla.

Student Work

February 2012

We are investigating various modeling techniques to see how they help us to make design decisions with daylight. We're comparing physical models photographed in daylight and under studio lighting and using digital means to locate human figures in spaces and scaled materials on surfaces while retaining the effects of light. We are also comparing these with digitally rendered views of the same spaces. Daylight is almost always more satisfying, more convincing, but digital renderings are seductive in their artificial perfection. Using both physical and digital models, is probably the most way to work. But we'd still like to know how close a digital view can approximate daylight.

See above for work by Erin Curley. Digitally enhanced view of a physical model of an interior space at the top and a digitally enhanced view of a courtyard at the bottom.

Memory 4.0 Color

We always know where daylight has been. It originates at the sun of course, but also we know about its passage through the sky and if it has touched the landscape, another building, a surface, a material with particular colors or finishes, by its color, direction, and intensity.

The blue sky is the result of the scattering of sunlight in the earth’s atmosphere. Atoms of the gases present in the atmosphere (oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, etc.), water vapor, and dust, combine to absorb light in ranges other than blue; the blue is reflected to our eyes. This sometimes results in the presence of blue tones in shadows cast on white walls on days of full blue skies. Moisture in the air results in overcast conditions and diffuses sunlight into cold, white light and gray sky; we associate gray and white skies with cool weather and have come to term white, gray, and blue as cool colors, associating color and temperature. Daylight, early and late in the day, travels through more of the earth’s atmosphere, through more dirt and dust particles, reflecting yellow, orange and red light to us. These hues, the colors of fire and of hot, dry climates, have come to be called warm colors.

Light and architecture can employ these strategies with startling effect. At Hans Hollein’s Museum of Modern Art (Frankfort, Germany; 1991) daylight entering a gallery through tall windows on opposite sides of a narrow portion of the building touches large wall surfaces painted dark green and deep orange. The colors are reflected subtly onto white wall surfaces visible around a stair. More directly, in buildings by the Mexican architects Luis Barragan and, later, Ricardo Legoretta, hot, tropical colors are used in remarkably unlikely combinations. The bright blues, hot pinks, yellow and red tones stun the eyes; in the hot sun of Mexican or of tropical climates, the colors may be bleached by the sun. Still, the warm colors appear to amplify the sizzle associated with the heat.

More Open Windows

Peter Schjeldahl, writing in the May 2 edition of The New Yorker magazine discusses an exhibition of paintings whose primary motif is the open window. Most of the paintings in the show date from the early and middle of the 19th century, which makes the Scandinavian paintings in my recent post (March 18, 2011) derivatives of this trend. Mr. Schejldahl reports that the open window motif quickly became a cliche, but a review of the later paintings in the Varnedoe volume (and my post) reveal a much more deeply felt attention to the details of light and shadow, Nordic culture, and the landscape, and interior space. But see for yourself; see Mr. Schejldahl's audio slide show and read his article.

AUDIO SLIDE SHOW

Romantic Windows

May 2, 2011

Peter Schjeldahl writes this week about the show “Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century,” at the Metropolitan Museum, which highlights Caspar David Friedrich and other Romantic artists “who became smitten, in the period during and after the Napoleonic Wars, with views of interior spaces that center on windows.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/multimedia/2011/05/02/110502_audioslideshow_romantic#ixzz1MAK9pwl9

Bagsvaerd Church, near Copenhagen: north elevation