Lyrics & music: Henrik Wigestrand 2007
Written and composed in a couple of days, based on Internet interviews* with James Carpenter; for a brief informal performance after the Lyskultur/Light Culture seminar in Sandvika, Norway, on 1 Nov 2007. After James Carpenter's presentation. (And this song is light culture indeed.)
The gentle feel
of glass and steel
when buildings shed their skin
a light glows from within,
is it a soul?
Directions of
reflections
can be used in many ways,
you keep the rays in place,
and keep from cold.
A Carpenter used to work
with a hammer and a saw;
Now he's sculpting glass
and bouncing sunlight on the floor.
Illuminating feelings
that will
change your point of view,
instead of older architectural trends,
for a wider audience to pay attention to
a sensory experience.
as we renew design, we all grow older,
a building's in the eye of the beholder
Using light and
glass
you need less energy to heat,
bounce the beams off prisms
and return them to the street;
Turning buildings inside out, so
those who pass will see
reflections of their movements displayed on LED.
You can fill your glass with light,
laminated glass will work all right.
Balancing the
daylight with an artificial light,
the glass behaves just like a spectrograph.
When he gets it right
he hides a building from our sight;
just like a magician with his staff
Now I may sound pretentious, and I sing a lot of bull,
but is your glass half empty or is your glass half full?Demo home recording of song (Windows Media layer format, 4MB)
*The articles:
http://www.dupont.com/safetyglass/lgn/stories/1006.html
http://www.chihuly.com/essays/intvwleslie.html
http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_143/designerbringlight.html
http://www.blogg.org/blog-8296-date-2004-10-29-billet-combining_art__architecture__engineering_and_technology-60205.html
http://www.andrewblum.net/typepad/2006/03/james_carpenter.html#more
.