ABSTRACT
Light enters a room, rebounds between objects, acquires tints and tones, colours surfaces. The potential for lighthouses to encapsulate ideas about light and dark as a matter of life and death is compounded by another major dualism: their position at the edge of safe and solid land where it meets the dark, formless deep. Thus, the lighthouse also represents the other half of a hydrotheological cycle too, its beam lighting the way towards regeneration. A contemporary of Christiaan Huygens expressed the idea of space filled with light through completely different means. A celebration of light is evident in multiple forms of art and architecture: in the gold bedecking Egyptian Pharoahs, in shining Celtic jewellery, in the gleaming domes of Islamic mosques. The glittering triptyches of the Early Church were made in parts so that, when they were opened, the gold, shimmering in the candlelight, seemed startling and miraculous.
