One evening at dusk, to research an upcoming article, I toured the Otto Kahn Mansion on East 91st Street.  The financial baron’s house, built in 1918, was designed by architects J. Armstrong Stenhouse and C. H. Gilbert in a somewhat restrained, neo-classical style inspired by the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome.  I was suitably impressed by all the things I should have been impressed with: the immaculate French limestone facades, the vaulted and frescoed library ceiling, the raised patio overlooking Central Park, and the pretty, pagoda-like elevator cab.  But what struck me the most was how dark the interiors were and how the darkness diminished my spirits.

Elaine Scarry has written with supreme elegance about the light bulb, and how it answered a deep human desire to see and live differently.  I’m wondering how the light bulb changed architecture, that is, how a building designed with the memory of candles and gaslight might be more shadowed, and less obliging, than a building designed after the advent of electric lighting.  The Kahn mansion was wired for electricity, but it still has the imprint of a building that was designed to be moved through at night only slowly, with apprehension.