Grand Central Station
The first photo in this article about Grand Central Station shows light streaming in from the windows. My understanding is it was intentionally designed with daylighting in mind.
In other words, those windows were conceived of as a primary means to provide adequate light in the building and historic photos show them doing just that.
But the windows no longer provide that kind of light. Why?
Because the building is now surrounded by skyscrapers.
Grand Central Station's daylighting plans are a victim of the structure's success. It brought so much development to the immediate area, it made an important detail of the building's design obsolete.
The photo chosen for this website is a photo of Grand Central Station. I chose it because I feel the image in question plays well with the "shadows" quote on the landing page and because this history where the building was designed with daylighting as a feature and now those windows no longer light the main floor with sunlight.
It's a relatively famous example of daylighting used in a building historically and you can see it in old photos though it no longer works that way.
Although this blog was revived just as I was writing up an elevator pitch for a clothing line I want to create, much of my work is about the built environment.
I grew up in an era where opening the curtains to get adequate light and opening two windows to create a cross breeze was the norm, not some weirdo exception. Buildings used to by default be built with their relationship to the outside world around them in mind.
It wasn't that many decades ago that most Americans had some kind of job on a farm and people commonly worked outdoors as at least part of their work. It was not only in MY lifetime but in the lifetime of my CHILDREN that the world stopped being mostly rural and now more than half of all people live in the city.
People who work in offices and drive cars sometimes spend very little time outside and no longer know how to relate to the natural environment within which the built environment exists.
This blog is in part because of my interest in business and how bad mental models negatively impact that, especially for online businesses where defects in one's mental models are especially harmful because there's no physical architecture that works well in spite of you missing something important about it.
But it's also about my interest in community development work and urban planning type work and how people have lost touch with reality in important ways which aren't important and now we are stupidly building Western architecture in places where it actively makes the heat worse, like India, because we are so out of touch with reality in ways that "went without saying" for people in the past, so not much was written down expounding in the importance of certain things and now we neither know they are important not under where the hell things went wrong because of not knowing that.