FOCUS 055


Opinion piece


Humankind has historically understood the importance of lighting, but its ubiquity has made us complacent, says Jonathan Rush. We need greater understanding of its relationship with human body and mind, he argues, and a more democratic approach to good lighting


IT WAS NOT until around the 1780s, with the rise of Capability Brown, that the ‘profession’ of landscape architecture turned from providing formal, decorative gardens to ones more aligned with nature. Rolling lawns, clumps of trees and belts of woodland defined Brown’s style much to the chagrin of his contemporaries, who disliked his approach and accused him of ‘encouraging his wealthy clients to tear out their splendid formal gardens and replace them with his facile compositions of grass, tree clumps and rather shapeless pools and lakes’. But Brown understood something that it is now common practice in the world of landscape – that humans have an inherent need for certain stimuli in terms of the physiological reward that nature brings.


A discussion of landscape architecture might seem a bit random if not irrelevant in an article on lighting, but as a profession and branch of design it has much in common with architectural lighting design – for one thing, that appreciation of the fundamental importance of nature, particularly in the latter case, the relationship between human beings and light; for another, its comparatively late arrival and recognition as a profession.


Te metier of the landscape architect was only formalised in the UK with the establishment of the Landscape Institute (LI) in 1929. Before that, its value was informally recognised in the days of Brown and others around the 1700-1800s. Of course, arguably it had existed for thousands of years before – a notable example being the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Te lighting design profession as such has emerged relatively recently (effectively established in the US in the 1960s). But clearly light has been fundamental to human existence since our early development. Our physiological and psychological need for it has driven the desire to shape and create it for our use.


Te discovery of fire and its subsequent development in more controlled forms became more notable as we moved through history, with candles and oil lamps providing a personal and portable method of illumination before, relatively recently, we developed gas and then electrical sources. Where natural light is concerned, our early ancestors worshipped the sun as a giver of light, but this evolved into a more sophisticated understanding of the value of daylight in ancient civilisations.


Te central oculus of the famous Pantheon in Rome allowed sunlight to penetrate the space in dramatic ways, but it also trapped the solar energy within the building, heating the space. Te use of this ‘heliocaminus’ became so popular in buildings within Rome that people started demanding protected views of the sky, which led to what can be described as an early form of the ‘right to light’ legislation familiar to us today.


JACK HOBHOUSE


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