Measuring Half-Light

This research starts from a practical question: how much light does a table need to work at without the room ceasing to be welcoming?

The notes that follow are a first draft: measurements, impressions and a few doubts we do not yet know how to settle.

There is a way of working that consists in starting from the end: imagining the house or the shop already lived in, with its things out of place and its lights on at odd hours, and only then asking what it needed. Often the answer is far less than had been planned. The people who live or work there occupy the space all at once and with an energy no plan can anticipate; the best you can do is leave them room, and a certain margin for getting things wrong.

None of these ideas is new, and probably none is exclusive to any one trade. But they are easily lost when there is a hurry, a tight budget or expectations about how things should look. That is why it is worth writing them down from time to time: not as a rule, but as a reminder of what we wanted to do when everything was still possible. The notes that follow are just that, a reminder, and like all reminders they serve mostly the person who writes them.