ABSTRACT
When the light and shade of a room catch the eye of an artist, architects can learn about relationships between shadow and atmosphere, and maybe try to emulate what they discover, in their own work. Shadow is the poetic realm of the obscure. ‘The night gains an incredible value in that it erases space. An architect can orchestrate shadow like a composer music. The arrangement of windows, projecting into the space at its corners, creates an ever-changing pattern of shadows slanting across the walls and sometimes illuminating the exhibits. Glasgow School of Art was designed in the 1890s. The entrance elevation, with its large windows, faces north, so that the studios receive evenly shadowed light. Films depend on architecture for their settings. Being photographic, their cinematographers and directors often seem to pay more attention to shadows than architects designing buildings for the real world. The contribution shadows make to the narrative of films is pictorial, metaphorical and symbolic.
