2011 - Daylight Symposium
LIGHT DEFINES THE JOURNEY OF OUR LIVES by Will Bruder
Speakers
Will Bruder
Architect
“Light defines the journey of our lives”. You can already experience this by watching the path of the sun in a room”. American architect Will Bruder has been living and working in Phoenix, Arizona. His architecture is a reflection of the surrounding desert landscape, its shapes and colours, and its daylight. In his work he is attracted by the dialogue between the pragmatic of making things, and the poetic of experiencing them: “I always work to let the ordinary become the extraordinary. Whether I work with a concrete block, a piece of wood or with ‘ordinary’ light, the key question is always, how to transform that ordinary thing into spaces and memories that achieve the sense of something extraordinary. Another aspect is how my buildings relate to their surroundings. When you look across the Arizona desert, your first perception is of how the buildings emerge from the earth. Your eye is drawn up along the surface of the building, towards the line where it kisses the sky. And that line tells you everything. This phenomenon is common to the desert places of the world, whether it is Morocco, the Middle East or Arizona. Our best buildings are the ones that form a perfect dialogue between shadow and light, and between the earth and the sky.”
Will Bruder
For 40 years, Will Bruder has explored inventive and contextually exciting architectural solutions in response to site opportunities and user needs. Will is a craftsman in his concern for detail and building processes, and a sculptor in his unique blending of space, materials, and light. With over 500 commissions the work has celebrated the craft of building in ways not typical in contemporary architecture. Will strives to invent form specific to function and client aspiration. Through his creative use of materials and light, Will’s ability to raise the ordinary to the extraordinary is renowned. Will’s architecture has been widely published in the United States, Europe, and Japan.
