Page 14 - Between light and shade

between light and shade, TRANSPARENCy and reflection

the shadow of reality. Fortunately, my cave is
filled with countless books, both theoretical and
practical, which give me what I need to establish
a knowledge base on which I can rely in my daily
practice and which, in return, is constantly upda-
ted by its encounter with the latter.

construction

Over the course of several millennia, buildings
have displayed consistent characteristics origi-
nating from the human soul and physiology, as
well as the surrounding environment.

These constants, including shadow and reflec-
tion, form the subject of the theory of architecture
and construction, including the oldest known
theory to date, which still retains all its relevance,
that of Vitruvius 2.

Françoise Choay 3 deals only with Vitruvian
theory because of its coherence, enhanced by
that developed by Christopher Alexander and
his team in the 1970s 4 for architecture alone.

2 Marcus Vitrivius Pollio (known as Vitruvius ~ 90 to 20
B.C.), De architectura.
3 Françoise Choay, La Règle et le Modèle : sur la théorie de l’ar-

chitecture et de l’urbanisme (The Rule and the Model: On the
Theory of Architecture and Urbanism), Paris, Éditions du Seuil,
1980.
4 Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa & Murray Silver-

stein, A Pattern Language, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1977. See also The Nature of Order. An essay on the Art of Build-

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