Depiction of shadow Shadow lines accentuate the placement of materials and elements such as windows and sills on building facades, lattice on garden walls, the eaves of a roof line, the overlapping shad- ows of steps, the rhythm of joints — especially the rhythm of false joints, capstones, molding, curb reveals and convex pavers. This refine - ment and re-imaging of the complex interplay of light and shade not only serves to make coherent the smooth planes of the eternal sur- face but maintains, even in this distilled format, the kinship we feel with the shadowed irregu- larities of the earth’s surface demanded by our sensuous memory. The crucial difference is that it exists only in the central movement of our gaze, in the moving orientation of our bodies in the sun and with the sun that imparts the rhythm of show and concealment. The entity in the built environment is, in this instance, itself totally motionless. It is not operating at all.
Possession of the originating process Permanent, unchanging, unmoving. This then is the perception we have about the earth’s sur- face based on our incorporation of show and concealment in the built environment. From there it is only a step to believing that by thinly cutting and pasting pieces of this surface onto various sites of the built environment we, in some short hand way, fulfill the needs of our deep sense memories for shadowed complex- ity. In the context of the eternal metaphors, we have perfect circles for trees , showing just enough of the squiggly line to portend show and concealment, yet not too much so as to dilute the metaphor or to bewilder the site plans’ adherence to cosmological patterns. We have in elevation filigreed lines for shrubs and trees that by present convention provide the coherence for the burnished facades con- structed behind them.
Ornamentation of shade It is not so much the subject matter — curling vines, floral centers, eggs, dentiles, rocks — pastiches of the divine metaphors in repeating ellipses or multiplication of rectangles. What is most significant is the actual shadows gen - erated by the ornamentation that speak to us of natural canopies , dappled breaks in vision and all the other surficial topographies of show and concealment. Whether at the top of the stunted tree forms of columns, or plaster rosettes, or steel trellises overhead, mullioned patterns, polished material next to rough, it is the presence of carved shadow that invites tactilicity and speaks to us of a surface outside the surface of the built world. The crucial difference is that there is no growth, no senescence, no disappearance. The shadow remains precise and exact, the entity eternally present.
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O n S ite review
S urface
I ssue 9 2003
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