Architektúra v šerosvite
Chiaroscuro in Architecture

Summary/Abstract: It seems that light does not create material substance, but presents a “clear” reason for its intensive rejection. Light is exuberant in our world; architecture and art factually as well as figuratively waste it. Light is excessively used and at the same time misused. Physical light has become cheap and profane: with minor exceptions things, artefacts and architecture have become meaninglessly bright or overloaded by light images; light has been making them more transparent, bright and unpleasantly dazzling. One would almost exclaim: “Let’s have more chiaroscuro in architecture!” Light has changed its status. In architecture playing with tectonics and fine aspects of construction (and violating „arché“ as well as „tekton“) light has been allowed to freely communicate, dramatize and change common statuses of buildings. Similarly to art, light in architecture could be independent and supplement a structure of architectural object in more effective ways than it was in the past. Contemporary construction techniques, basic technology as well as materials make usage of excessive light and work with it as if it was literally “light substance”. This process was probably initiated by various factors: computer science, abundance of energy, mass media and public expressions of corporality as well as aggressive and shocking visual aspects of show business which could be rather ostentatious. Architecture, design and art adapted that culturally conditioned “situational luminosity” and became parts of rather adventurous play with rules determined by light. It is therefore obvious that architecture pays for stunning and imaginative light by dribbling out its essence. Material lights versus immaterial lights: It has long been obvious that in architecture the immaterial nature of light as well as its ability to simulate or supplement substance could convey sensory perception related to the conceptions of ancient philosophers, builders of cathedrals, baroque architects, and others. When they were speaking of construction similar to materialized “petrified music” they meant also light solution. Hans Sedlmayr has detected the basic syndromes or characteristics of light in art manifested at physical as well as metaphysical levels, in its symbolic, mystical, aesthetical and metaphorical aspects. Sedlmayr’s „lichtmaterien“ have used light to find the sense, content and meaning of what architecture and art should be. Artificial light in particular has displayed peculiar energetic regularities. It is building its own structures that in principle do not depend on construction. Artificial lights suppress materiality of constructions; they build their own “luminous construction in building” and thus prefer luminous, fluid and immaterial aspects to real things. They therefore present an independent luminosity with certain functions and meanings: there is an object there as well as light; though together they form an object, their expressions are different. If light will

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