Review: Shadow-Makers: A Cultural History of Shadows in Architecture, by Stephen Kite

Abstract

Stephen Kite Shadow-Makers: A Cultural History of Shadows in Architecture London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, 331 pp., 125 b/w illus. $43 (paper), ISBN 9781472588098 In his excellent collection of essays Shadow-Makers , Stephen Kite proposes to bring shadows “out of the shadows” (5)—a reasonable objective, given that architecture in recent years has been slanted toward the making of great, illuminated spaces, shiny surfaces, and the minimization of darkness and all manner of unhygienic stuff. “Shadow has had a ‘bad’ press” (7), Kite claims, at least since Plato's cave parable in the Republic , in which confined prisoners know reality only through shadows cast by activities they cannot directly see. As shadows take on a life dissociated from their sources and the light that cast them, they become untethered from reality, and it becomes difficult to verify their truth. The cultural associations of darkness are often negative and include—as we know even without reading this book—the unknown, the sinister, ignorance, dirtiness, ugliness, sadness, unhealthiness, chaos, perdition, and evil. Kite finds the sources of our built shadow world and affirms their connections to constructed reality such that they are no longer sinister; rather, as Kite notes, citing Louis Kahn, they illustrate that shadow belongs to light (288). No wonder we fear the dark. We know our world as a light-filled place interrupted by darkness, and we link gloom with specific places: caves, basements, attics, crypts, and the underground. But in the history of art and architecture, and on our better days, this menu of nastiness confronts a greater truth: the universe is a beautiful, dark place, with remarkable occasions of light and gradations of shadow. Some cultures have recognized this, seeing black as representative of creativity and fertility, as did ancient Egyptians, for whom black represented …