Book excerpt: Light: The Shape of Space Designing with Space and Light Lou Michel Every design professional who touches a space shapes the light and the feeling of that space. Architect, lighting engineer, interior designer, lighting or home furnishing manufacturer: each contributes an aesthetic layer, sometimes yielding unexpected results. All too often the best laid plans of one professional are unintentionally subverted by another. Removing surprises and guess work from design, Lou Michel, honored architectural lighting educator, has created Light: The Shape of Space, showing how to design with the effects of light rather than light itself. The book is a revolutionary resource for all design professionals and manufacturers of surfacing materials. Drawing on over fifteen years’ experience of research and teaching in the architectural Space and Light Laboratory at The University of Kansas, Michel masterfully examines the interrelationship of lighting and the design of architectural space as perceived not in architectural photos or paint chips and fabric swatches, but by human vision — the gateway to emotional response. The book was written for professionals who care about how people feel in the spaces they design, and focuses on the humanization of architecture. Taking a non-stylistic approach to design, Michel analyzes architecture from the perspective of how the users see their surroundings as they move through space. The reader will learn what pleases and what disturbs people based on how the human visual system responds to color, texture, pattern, and brightness. The book features principles of design for the student and professional, and is generously supported by illustrations and research. Michel also provides a method for evaluating the visual effectiveness of building materials and lighting systems, including those that will appear on the market long after this book is dog-eared. Michel unveils a groundbreaking luminance brightness rating system (LBR) and a nine-zone brightness scale to aid designers in previsualizing the appearance of surfacing materials at every stage of the design process, from schematics to development to refinement. Among the topics treated are: the interaction of lighting and spatial design color theory for space and light the luminance relationships between free-standing objects and the surrounding spatial boundaries against which they are seen the appearance of building materials in color and brightness when modified by light and spatial location lighting spatial connections, including the perception of rooms adjacent to the observer lighting and perception of spaces screened by architectural grilles creating lighted space Designing with the effects of light is both an art and a science. No other book on the market bridges that gap as successfully as Light: The Shape of Space.