135 Tapestry of Light and Dark*

. . . passages, entrances, stairs arc given their rough position by The Flow Through Rooms (131), Short Passages (132), Staircase as a Stage (133), Zen View (134). This pattern helps you fine tune their positions by placing light correctly.

In a building with uniform light level, there are few "places" which function as effective settings for human events. This happens because, to a large extent, the places which make effective settings are defined by light.

People are by nature phototropic - they move toward light, and, when stationary, they orient themselves toward the light. As a result the much loved and much used places in buildings, where the most things happen, are places like window seats, verandas, fireside corners, trellised arbors; all of them defined by nonuniformities in light, and all of them allowing the people who are in them to orient themselves toward the light.

We may say that these places become the settings for the human events that occur in the building. Since there is good reason to believe that people need a rich variety of settings in their lives (see for instance, Roger Barker, The Stream of Behavior: Explorations of its Structure and Content,New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1963), and since settings are defined by "places," which in turn seem often to be defined by light, and since light places can only be defined by contrast with darker ones, this suggests that the interior parts of buildings where people spend much time should contain a great deal of alternating light and dark. The building needs to be a tapestry of light and dark.

This tapestry of light and dark must then fit together with the flow of movement, too. As we have said, people naturally tend to walk toward the light. It is therefore obvious that any entrance, or any key point in a circulation system, must be systematically lighter than its surroundings - with light (daylight and artificial light) flooded there, so that its intensity becomes a natural target. The reason is simple. If there are places which have more light than the entrances and circulation nodes, people will tend to walk toward them (because of their phototropic tendency) and will therefore end up in the wrong place - with frustration and confusion as the only possible result.

If the places where the light falls are not the places you are meant to go toward, or if the light is uniform) the environment is giving information which contradicts its own meaning. The environment is only functioning in a single-hearted manner, as information, when the lightest spots coincide with the points of maximum importance.

Therefore:

Create alternating areas of light and dark throughout the building, in such a way that people naturally walk toward the light, whenever they are going to important places: seats, entrances, stairs, passages, places of special beauty, and make other areas darker, to increase the contrast.

Where the light to walk toward is natural light, build seats and alcoves in those windows which attract the movement - Window Place (180). If you use skylights, then make the surfaces around the skylight warm in color - Warm Colors (250); otherwise the direct light from the sky is almost always cold. At night make pools of incandescent light which guide the movement - Pools of Light (252) . . . .

A Pattern Language is published by Oxford University Press, Copyright Christopher Alexander, 1977.