Weight of Light
- Copenhagen
- Rune Bakke
- Publications
- 2023
Northern winter light is the constraint most of our buildings are actually designed around, and it is almost never the subject of the photographs made of them. Architectural photography prefers a clear morning in June. This book does not contain one.
Over two winters we returned to nine completed projects — six of ours, three not — between November and February, and photographed each of them across a single day, from before dawn until after the light had gone. The plates are sequenced by hour rather than by building, so the book reads as one very long day moving through nine different rooms.
The text is marginal in both senses. There are no essays. Each spread carries a line or two in the gutter margin: the hour, the orientation, and an observation about what the light is doing that we could not have predicted from a drawing. Some of them are corrections of our own earlier assumptions.
The most useful finding, and the reason the book exists, is that low sun reaches much further into a plan than any of our shadow studies had suggested, and that the resulting deep raking light is worth designing for explicitly — a deep reveal, a pale floor, a wall left empty at the far end of a room.
It is a 96-page paperback, printed in duotone, and it was made in an edition of twelve hundred.