Light and Place: Robert Irwin and Others in Southern California

Abstract

This dissertation argues that the clement climate and habitability of Southern California, as well as the rhetoric that enveloped its promotion over the course of a century, informed a specific mode of creation and representation of place in painting, photography, light-based installations, and architecture. These architectural and artistic interventions on and about Southern California conjure light to illuminate the ideal habitability of the place in question and attract viewers to images and environments that arouse sensorial responses. In the built environment, the creation of place is performed through a transparency of partitions between indoor and outdoor spaces that facilitate light infiltration, as well as through adaptability to the specific features of the site and careful consideration of the dweller’s sensorial reactions. Southern California artist Robert Irwin in particular, provides a key for the interpretation of this peculiar rapport to place. Irwin’s light installations respond to as well as embody Southern California, by assessing through light its habitability, and by responding to the dialogue of indoor and outdoor spaces experienced in Southern California dwellings at midcentury. More specifically, I contend that the light installations of Robert Irwin act as a quintessentially Southern California contemplation on the phenomenon of place by mediating the genius loci of the region through the architectural detail of the window-wall.