Professor Plummer Completes Book on Architectural Masters

By Meghan Dufresne, News Editor

Professor Henry Plummer recently finished the first volume of a series focusing on light in modern architecture. In Masters of Light: Twentieth-Century Pioneers, Plummer explores many innovative ways that natural light has been used to enliven and give meaning to architecture. In this book, Plummer illustrates special light qualities in buildings designed between 1902 and 1979 through his remarkable photographs and written descriptions.

Masters of Light begins with a multidimensional analysis of light in the twentieth century. Professor Plummer discusses changing views of light in modern science, art, medicine, writing, and architecture. He explains that light was first considered as both an energy wave and a particle in Max Planck’s quantum theory of 1900. At the same time in medicine, it was decided that light and fresh air are necessary for good health. Modern painters and artists such as Van Gogh, Seurat, and Monet also began looking at and depicting light in a different and unusual way.

In the early twentieth century, architects also began to realize the importance of light. Le Corbusier stated “light is the key to well-being, I compose with light.” New technologies developed in the late nineteenth century allowed architects to design buildings that were considerably more open to the outside than ever before. With the introduction of steel into construction, it became possible to incorporate more windows and openings. Light became an important expressive presence in twentieth century architecture.

Professor Plummer discusses the way that buildings have been reduced to bare essentials in the modern period. This pairing down of ornament and erosion of form led to buildings that were perfect containers for the ever-changing presence of natural light. Plummer describes the benefits of light and shadow as being related to openness, crystallinity, health, silence, atmosphere, mobility, and place (or location).

In the twentieth century, with the emergence of skyscrapers and the work architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn, and Alvar Aalto, glass became tied to a utopian architectural vision. In many cases architects simplified their buildings to be plain white volumes, perfectly depicting the behavior of light throughout the day and the seasons. Glass was used in a variety of ways—rounded, layered, curved, rolled, angled, or placed within a screen—in order to achieve calculated effects.

The second part of Masters of Light: Volume One contains photographs and descriptions of several buildings throughout the world in which light is handled in an extraordinary way. For example, Eero Saarinen’s MIT Chapel in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Kramer Chapel in Fort Wayne, Indiana are both dark volumes with scarce light. Light comes from the top and bottom of the volumes to emphasize the verticality of the structure. Light is also concentrated around the altar area to represent its importance. Herman Hertzberger takes the opposite approach with his Centraal Beheer in Apledoorn, the Netherlands. He creates a porous construction that has a series of openings to bring natural light into all parts the building. Professor Plummer’s master examples run the gamut from dark buildings, to jewel-like crystalline volumes, to solid walls washed with light, to highly reflective or refractive forms that bring the outside into the building. In all of his examples, Plummer explains and shows the ways that mass has been dissolved in modern buildings in order to exhibit the temporal, ephemeral, and active qualities of natural light.