An excerpt: Holl, on being receptive to daylight

Natural light is an essential force interlocked with time. The sun arcs through the sky each day at a different angle; the season's change plays out in the vessel of the house like a volumetric sundial. Unexpected changing intensities and consistencies drive sunlight in the counterpoint of moving shadows. Black against white, blurred against crisp, dissolving against knife-sharp edges, the subtle music of light plays out in space. Porous light and shadow, like the dapple of the sun's rays penetrating dense foliage, is often ordered in elliptical shapes. This phenomenon is due to the fact that the sun is not a point; it is like a sun picture on a sheet of paper.
    Shadow, sunlight, and geometry are interlocked in experiential phenomena. Looking at my own shadow on the ground I notice that the shadow of my head is blurry while shadows of my feet are sharp.
    The shadow of a porous plane, like the shadows of wire mesh, can exhibit curious properties. For example, a rectangular mesh at certain sun angles only shows vertical shadows. In his 1954 book Light and Color in the Open Air, the physicist M. Minnaert writes about nature's phenomena, exclaiming, "It is very difficult to see new things, even when they are before our eyes."
    The distance of the shadow to the plane of projection drastically alters its character. To see this phenomenon, simply hold a perforated plane immediately in front of a piece of blank paper then move it farther away gradually. If the architect engages this natural light phenomenon, these very different shadow patterns might be created by a certain architectural space.

From Steven Holl's introduction to House: Black Swan Theory, in which fifteen of his designs for residences and small semi-residential buildings, 1986 to 2006, are presented as studies in phenomenology of place & space, one-offs, discrete and situation-specified.