Let there be light - Light and Space in New American Museums

The American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.” Although Emerson said this in the early nineteenth century, he could very well have been remarking on the design theme of many of the most notable new museums in the United States: a turning away from the early 1980s black-box attitude and a welcoming embrace of natural light.