Lighting up the North.

The distinct and highly poetic qualities of light in the far Northern latitudes have inspired generations of Nordic artists and architects to create works that reflect the beauty of the dream-inducing atmosphere and landscape.

THE IMPORTANCE OF NATURAL LIGHT TO THE ART OF building in Finland, and to some extent all Scandinavia, is precisely because of its scarcity for half the year. But it results as well from a desire to be close to the haunting beauty of light and colour which define the Nordic world, and infuse the landscape with mood.

Northern light derives from a blend of atmospheric conditions and low sun. At very high latitudes, rays of light are pale and weak, arriving at angles that are often horizontal and may even come from below the horizon. Seasons bring an astonishing contrast between summer, when there is sunshine even at midnight, and winter with its perpetual darkness and gloom. During long midsummer evenings, the sun dissolves in a blue haze which fills the sky like gentle mist. And at winter dusk, sky and snow are bathed in delicate colours which linger for hours.

While Scandinavian countries have different terrain and climate, they all share a bewitching light. Even more than the landscape, it is this dream-inducing atmosphere which conveys where you are -- at the outermost edge of the world. Left behind is the sharp and brilliant light of the South, which makes perception more clear and constant.

The mystical Northern sky was absorbed into saga and myth, and deeply coloured all the arts. [1] Most renowned are plein air paintings from the turn of the century, whose artists were drawn to the eerie glow which gives the region its brooding mystery, and source of geographic identity. One immediately sees this spell in a series of exhibitions from the 1980s and '90s on Scandinavian painting, whose titles alone are revealing -- Northern Light, Dreams of a Summer Night, The Mystic North, The Light of the North. [2] Central to the Nordic 'mood painting' is an attempt to bring viewers into startling contact with evocative aspects of light, which suffuse the picture surface and are often its very subject. A frail luminosity was constructed on canvas with penetrating accuracy, producing a hypnotic mixture of realism and magic. Apart from the unreal haze of summer evening, whose colour is neither of night nor day, there was a fascination with the starry winter night, translucent mist of the forest, glistening ice and snow, and throbbing violets of winter dusk. In architectural scenes, these subtle tones bathe over volumes to bring every surface under their spell, imbuing rooms with an air of solitude, touched with spirituality.

BY THE 1920s and '30s, architects were learning to handle the soft dilute light of the North with equal poetic force. But they faced a problem unique to their medium -- how to illuminate interiors and provide contact with nature in a climate where daylight was scarce, and a limited resource. While winter darkness and precious light are concerns throughout Scandinavia, they have been a central preoccupation of twentieth-century Finland, and define its building culture.

Drawing on centuries of peasant woodcraft, and the white tones. of l'esprit nouveau, modern Finnish architects pioneered a new kind of space in harmony with the low sun and dim dusk. Methods of lighting developed that were ample, yet deliberately soft-focused, gently nuanced, and painterly in manner, throwing emphasis onto tonal relations rather than contour. Stretching back to figures like Alvar Aalto and Erik Bryggman is an art of creating mood, not with harsh light but exceptionally weak illumination, whose rarity brings to each room a reticent beauty.

Finnish techniques for managing light begin with carving and folding the building shell to form channels and scoops, acting as funnels. These profiles increase the capture of light, while drawing it from specific parts of the sky. Baffles and blades, troughs and cells guide the light as a flowing liquid, diffusing rays by a series of reflections, and shedding them where needed free of glare. By employing such optical instruments not only along outer walls, but midpoints in the roof an entire building can be exposed to natural light, and stay in touch with shifting seasons and passing weather.

The most exquisite touch is the delicate surface prepared for faint, frail light to play. Wall and ceiling are tactile yet pale in colour, to reflect and register subtle illumination. Blond and unfinished woods, grainy coatings of white plaster, monochrome expanses of brick, and at one time granite, provide neutral yet responsive grounds for magnifying feeble light, bringing out imperceptible tones and angles.

RECURRENT ALSO IN Finnish daylighting is a fusion of rational illumination and poetic evocation. A generous amount of light is provided to see by, and combat the long winter night, while this same light is treated to create mood, and conjure up an atmosphere distinct to the North. Thus Aalto's interiors may be well-lit, but also resonate with nature -- materializing the forest in baffled screens, the snowy winter and summer night in white cavities, a misty veil of sky in rooflights, and a shimmering lake in ribbed ceramic tile. Heightened abstractions by later generations, such as the dark containers and steel meshes of Heikkinen & Komonen, are no less tied to the Nordic climate and sky, as was the architecture of the past, notably the peasant log hut and white-painted church. Whether conscious or not, these buildings are inscribed with impressions of native light, maintaining contact with reality.

A resonance of building and sky calls attention to the most elusive aspect of spirit of place. Our sense of being somewhere distinct in the world is never due merely to physical forms, but arises as well from metaphysical phenomena, and the intangible spell they weave. The softness or harshness of things which results from ambient illumination, and its spectral composition, affect human perception and thereby a sense of reality, shaping the temperament of a people and their landscape, and general ethos of a culture.

A built evocation of Northern light does more than reproduce nature or delight the senses. It helps the Finn better understand his place and himself, conjuring up an image of what he feels inside and believes to be true. And by doing so, it helps him be fully human -- restoring the spiritual dimension of life, and allowing him to inhabit the environment emotionally as well as physically.

The Finnish stress upon light and atmosphere also suggests an affinity to our time. Its transcendental urge is echoed in other cultures, and profoundly modern in its ties to non-objective art and phenomenal experience. As with enchanted buildings by Louis Kahn and Tadao Ando, or installations by James Turrell and Robert Irwin, a level is touched that transcends material, reducing the physical to an elemental state that is almost nothing, and giving access to a kind of magic that is real.

This essay forms part of a longer treatise 'Building with Northern Light' first published by ARK (the Finnish Architectural Review) in April, May and June 1999.

(1.) The mystic quality of Nordic light, and its influence on painting in both northern Europe and North America between the 1890s and mid-twentieth century, was the subject of a 1984 exhibition The Mystic North, held at the Art Gallery of Ontario and Cincinnati Art Museum. See Roald Nasgaard, The Mystic North (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984).

(2.) The exhibition Northern Light was organized by the Brooklyn Museum in New York, where it was shown from November 1982 to January 1983. Dreams of a Summer Night was held at the Hayward Gallery in London from July to October 1986. The Light of the North was organized by and held at the Musco Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, from March to May 1995.