Designing with Light

Fülszöveg

DESIGNING WITH
LIGHT
The Creative Touch
r I 1 he fifth volume in a series devoted
T
to the use of design materials, this vividly illustrated book explores the wonder that light can perform on interior spaces. Designing with Light: The Creative Touch shows how designers and architects use light to vitalize objects, surfaces, and environments throughout the home. As architect Ricardo Legorreta states, "Light and architecture go together," and Dr. Carol Soucek King brilliantly reveals the importance of lighting design as an essential and often unifying element.
In these resplendent pages, we see how natural and artificial light, in the past used to perform a sole function, now has a multitude of new roles. Light has the power to characterize and accent rooms; it can convey an aura of intimacy, provide a touch of sophistication and provocatively enhance a home's architectural details with special effects.
Dr. King visits over twenty-five home settings of international lighting... Tovább

Fülszöveg

DESIGNING WITH
LIGHT
The Creative Touch
r I 1 he fifth volume in a series devoted
T
to the use of design materials, this vividly illustrated book explores the wonder that light can perform on interior spaces. Designing with Light: The Creative Touch shows how designers and architects use light to vitalize objects, surfaces, and environments throughout the home. As architect Ricardo Legorreta states, "Light and architecture go together," and Dr. Carol Soucek King brilliantly reveals the importance of lighting design as an essential and often unifying element.
In these resplendent pages, we see how natural and artificial light, in the past used to perform a sole function, now has a multitude of new roles. Light has the power to characterize and accent rooms; it can convey an aura of intimacy, provide a touch of sophistication and provocatively enhance a home's architectural details with special effects.
Dr. King visits over twenty-five home settings of international lighting designers that represent a complete palette of styles and applications, each reflecting the complex requirements of lighting myriad spaces.
Sorry to repeat myself, but in the last sentence of a book titled A Philosophy of Interior Design, I wrote that interiors constitute "our most personal art." Carol Soucek King, I'm glad to see, seems to share the same view, for in her admirable series of books Dr. King focuses on just those aspects of interior design that make it personal.
The grand concept is not to be neglected, of course. Like any other art, interior design depends for its success on the encompassing vision that relates its many elements in a meaningful whole. But such vision, in interiors, becomes manifest and comprehensible through the myriad details with which we are in intimate contact: the feel of a drawer-pull, the profile of a cornice, the polish and grain of wood, the "hand" of fabric.
This contact involves all our senses. We see our interiors, certainly, but we also smell the materials in them, we hear their acoustic properties, we brush up against their walls, step on their floors, open their case goods, sit on their chairs. More than any other, interior design is the art we use. In that sense, it is not only our most personal art, but also the one most responsible for our well-being. In the context of increasingly brutalized urban enviroments, this is increasingly true and increasingly important. Interior design is often our refuge.
It is therefore a very welcome prospect that Dr. King is turning her experienced editorial eye to the details and materials on which the art of interior design depends. I'm sure we will all benefit from her discoveries.
-Stanley Abercrombie, FAIA
Chief Editor, Interior Design Vissza