In architectural discourse, light is often celebrated as a universal value—synonymous with clarity, progress, and functionality—yet Marcos de J. Aguirre Franco provocatively repositions darkness not as absence, but as an essential complement to spatial experience. Drawing from both Western physics and Eastern aesthetics, particularly Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows, the article argues for a phenomenological approach to architecture that reclaims the perceptual interplay between light and darkness as foundational to how space is inhabited and understood. The dominance of light-centric design in modern architecture, Aguirre Franco suggests, reflects a deeper epistemological bias within Western thought that privileges visibility and abstraction over tactility and ambiguity. This results in an alienated spatiality, where built environments are reduced to containers of function, detached from the sensory richness of everyday experience. In contrast, darkness—as filtered through Tanizaki and Goethe’s optic theories—enables a form of intimate spatial immersion, allowing inhabitants to engage the world with nuance, slowness, and embodied sensitivity. This duality is not merely optical but deeply ontological, implicating the subject’s relation to space as an active process of co-constitution. By rejecting darkness, modern architecture risks eliminating the emotive and meditative dimensions of built space, reinforcing a split between inhabitant and habitat. Thus, the essay calls for a revalorisation of contrast, ambiguity, and atmospheric subtlety, proposing a spatial ethics grounded in perceptual complementarities rather than visual hegemony. Urban design, in this view, becomes not only a technical practice but a cultural poetics, where the aesthetic of shadow reveals the profound entanglement between space and subjectivity.
Aguirre Franco, M. (2022). Complementarity of opposites as perceptual principle in the experience of space: light and darkness. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 12(2), 9–17.