Light, Place, and the Temporal Experience: A Proposal for a Live Work Building in Nashville, Tennessee

“An architecture must have the religion of light. A sense of light is the giver of all presences, because natural light gives the mood of the day. The season of the year is brought into a room.”

Louis Kahn

The understanding and manipulation of natural light lie at the heart of any architectural project, but it is also a universally available, physical manifestation of the passage of time. Natural light signals the times of the day, providing different qualities of light as the sun penetrates the atmosphere at different angles. Seasonally, the summer sun shines high in the sky through more pronounced foliage while low winter sun angles produce long shadows and light with vastly different strengths and tones. Natural light has a profound ability to convey, at any point in our built environment, a remarkable immediacy of ‘place’ and ‘time’ (Ando, 471).

However, the abundance of natural light does not in itself communicate temporality. It is the interaction between natural light and architecture where the temporal experience is realized. The few architects who have conveyed this phenomenon so successfully have drawn from antiquity, designing simple forms with calculated approaches to capturing, manipulating, and displaying natural light. The task of contemporary architects should be to reestablish the temporal experience, reminiscent of Tadao Ando, Le Corbusier, and Louis Kahn. In doing so, architecture will regain the sensual experiences and meaning it has lost.

This thesis will investigate the use of light and the temporal experience in architecture as a vehicle to reestablish man’s sensory experience of the natural world. The proposal for this architectural investigation is a live work studio environment in Nashville, Tennessee, where residences have the unique experience of occupying a single building 24 hours a day. The great majority of us occupy several different buildings throughout the day, resulting in the loss of the complete temporal experience. To experience how natural light engages, enlivens, and transforms a single work of architecture throughout an entire day and throughout the seasons is to fully understand the sensual qualities that it possesses.

The site for this investigation is a Brownfield area of North Nashville, scarred by large scale manufacturing and industry. Currently, the area is in the beginning stages of redevelopment into a collection mixed use, residential, and retail properties. Reestablishment of the sensual experience within this desolate and highly urbanized environment will be extremely valuable in this curative process.