## Foreword

One of the basic human requirements is the need to dwell, and one of the central human acts is the act of inhabiting, of connecting ourselves, however temporarily, with a place on the planet which belongs to use and to which we belong. This is not, especially in the tumultuous present, an easy (act as it attested by the uninhabitted and unhabitable no-places in cities everywhere), and it requires help: we need allies in inhabitation.

Fortunately, we have at hand many allies, if onle we call on them,; other upright objects, from towers to chimneys to columns, stand in for us in sympathetic imitation of our own upright stance. Flowers and gardends server as testimonials to our own care, and breezes loosely captured can connect us with the very edge of the infinite. But in the West our own most powerful ally is light. "The sun never knew how wonderful it was," the architect Louis Kahn said, "until it fell on the wall of a building." And for us the act of inhabitation is mostly performed in cahoots with the sun, our staunchest ally, bathing our world or flickering through it helping give it light.

It comes with the thirll of a slap for us then to hear praise of shadows and darkness; so it is when there comes to use the excitement of realizing that musiciaians everwhere make their sounds to capture silence or that architects develop complex shapes just to envelop empty space. Thus darkness illuminates for us a culture very different from our own; but at the same time it helps us to look deep into ourselves to our own inhabitation of our world, as it describres with spinetingling insights the traditional Japanese inhabitation of theirs. It could change our lives.

— Charles Moore (School of Architecture, UCLA)