Page 89 - Between light and shade

ChapteR 3

Shade

Shade only exists because there is light.
The following thoughts refer to opaque mate-

rial rather than to transparent material and to its
reflections, which have been discussed thus far.
The contradiction is only apparent as it is not as
autonomous objects that these two sorts of mate-
rials are of interest to architects, but in the way
in which they represent industrial or handmade
construction elements, produced and assembled
to create a real building.

Yet, the majority of materials that architects
work with are opaque: the structure is opaque,
stone and brick are opaque, as are wood, steel
and tiles 1. It was several thousand years ago that
architecture appeared on earth as an independent

1 Of course there are buildings with a glass structure, but these
are experimental or showcase projects, which are closer to,
potentially inhabited, sculptures than to architecture. The
glass sculpture in front of the head office of AGC in Louvain-
la-Neuve [Fig. 1] is an example of this.
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