Architects design as much with light as with stone or timber. A reflection on what my studio work taught me about working with the sun.
In Pittsburgh, the overcast winter sky can last for weeks. The light is flat, diffuse, almost reluctant. Working here during school taught me that light is not a given. It is a resource — and designing with it requires the same rigor as designing with steel or concrete.
The best architects have always understood this. Alvar Aalto placed his windows to catch the northern sky — a diffuse, consistent light that would not glare. Louis Kahn, who studied just down the road at Penn, said that a room was not a room without natural light. These are not poetic statements. They are structural ones.
What is less often said is that an obsession with light is also an obsession with darkness. The grey months teach you what absence of light does — how it changes the experience of space, of movement, of social life. Buildings must accommodate both conditions, and the best of them make the contrast between the two into an architectural experience.
In the Threshold Pavilion, my thesis project, I positioned a single skylight over the central gathering space so that on clear winter days, a narrow beam of sunlight crosses the interior floor around midday. For that brief window, the space is completely transformed. I think that kind of precision — designing not just the space but its relationship to a specific moment in the day — is what makes architecture more than building.
The sun is not a background condition. It is a material.
Emma Nilson
Architect, Pittsburgh