2004-04-22 Sun at Last
I’m sitting towards the rear of our charter bus on the way from Treviso to Ravenna. We all were a little bummed about not getting into Tadao Ando’s tension-and-parabola Bennetton factory (note to self: make reservations), but we have little to complain about. After three weeks of pretty solid rain and grey skies, the past three sunny days have put everyone in a good mood.
It’s also put everyone to sleep. We’ve had a fast paced week running from one church to another, studying Palladio, Alberti, Scarpa, and more. Still, it’s hard to imagine tiring of massive villas, gold leaf, marble, frescoes, and every other glorious product of Italy’s upper crust – never you mind that their wealth came from dancing on the backs of the poor.
The bus ride is pleasant. The sun is beating on my bare shoulders. Over the slumbering form of Travis across the aisle, the view of a pastoral Italian landscape is broken only by the rhythm of telephone poles, dancing by to the beat of the Celtic music on my iPod.
The idyllic scene, with fields of green and brown, and farmhouses roofed with Martian-red shingles, gives way to a wide, shallow marsh. We pass under a highway overpass and encounter a commercial industrial area. Two large, concrete parabolic shells are grown over with weeds as they stand guard over buildings, marvels of engineering seemingly unappreciated.
The glare of the sun that put everyone to sleep wakes everyone up as the bus rounds a bend. Yawns, idle chatter, crinkling of plastic bags, and the sound of Ponti eating her old, yellow apple break the silence.
Sun. So much more than light. As Carlo Scarpa’s work points out, light and shadow – and all factors associated with them – have everything to do with the experience of space and the mood of the user. Tadao Ando points out the importance of the sun… without visual access to the sky, humans become temporally distracted, and disconnected from the natural environment.
The sun’s relationship to the environment, Bill McDonough preaches, is crucial. Sun is heat, sun is light, it is energy, it is income, it is life.
To think, all the Beatles had to say was: “Here Comes the Sun.”
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