Light, Threshold and the Numinous: A Design Methodology for Light at the Moment of Crossing

Abstract

This thesis examines how light can shape numinous experience at architectural thresholds. Contemporary lighting practice often treats light as a technical variable measured through illumination, glare, energy, and daylight performance. While these metrics are necessary, they rarely address the felt power of light in moments of crossing: the shift from compression to release, darkness to luminosity, enclosure to openness, or ordinary perception to heightened awareness. Drawing from theories of the numinous, liminality, phenomenology, architectural light, pattern language, and awe, the thesis develops a six-quality framework for threshold lighting: compression and release, shadow and luminosity, directionality, materiality, temporal change, and inside-outside tension. The design project, an artist retreat center on Hood Canal in Port Ludlow, Washington, tests this framework through site strategy, spatial sequence, renderings, and physical light-study models. Rather than treating the retreat as a collection of rooms, the project understands it as a sequence of crossings, using light as the primary medium through which arrival, contemplation, and transformation are experienced. The thesis concludes that the framework is most useful not as a checklist, but as a set of experiential questions that can guide design decisions across site, section, material, and atmosphere.