## Foreword
One of the basic human requirements is the need to dwell, and one of the central human acts is the act of inhabiting, of connecting ourselves, however temporarily, with a place on the planet which belongs to use and to which we belong. This is not, especially in the tumultuous present, an easy (act as it attested by the uninhabitted and unhabitable no-places in cities everywhere), and it requires help: we need allies in inhabitation.
Fortunately, we have at hand many allies, if onle we call on them,; other upright objects, from towers to chimneys to columns, stand in for us in sympathetic imitation of our own upright stance. Flowers and gardends server as testimonials to our own care, and breezes loosely captured can connect us with the very edge of the infinite. But in the West our own most powerful ally is light. "The sun never knew how wonderful it was," the architect Louis Kahn said, "until it fell on the wall of a building." And for us the act of inhabitation is mostly performed in cahoots