Long Live Light

Light has been around a long time, and Parsons School of Design will soon have a timeline, and a course, to prove it. With a $20,000 grant from the Nuckolls Fund received in 2003, Parsons under the guidance of JoAnne Lindsley, director of the school’s lighting design program, has nearly finished developing a curriculum around the ‘Historical Sociological and Spiritual Influences of Light in the Built Environment,’ beginning in 5000 BC and continuing to present. The material will be taught in the spring semester, though Lindsley says a comprehensive timeline of the history of light and a lengthy bibliography will be completed by the end of the summer and made digitally available to anyone interested in the subject. ‘We hope to bring students, and anyone else, to look at the various ways light has been important to people,’ said Lindsley during a presentation of the research findings at the IESNA Annual Conference in Tampa, Florida, in July. She notes that there has not been a book on this topic since W.T. O’Dea’s Social History of Lighting, published in 1958. Now out of print, the book is hard to find and, therefore, Lindsley hopes to publish-in some form yet to be determined-the information she has gathered.