Cultural Iceberg, Japanese Houses, and the Grammar of the Unseen

I. The Iceberg Cometh

So there’s this diagram that shows up in freshman sociology classes that represents “culture” as an iceberg. You know the one. The tip above water, visible, shiny, obvious: language, food, architecture, fashion, and maybe pop music. And then this enormous, dark mysterious icy base of values, belief systems, social norms, etc.—all of which, while unseen, form the basis of the visible stuff.

If this seems a little too simplistic —i.e. the seen vs. the unseen, the iceberg model gets at something interesting: that what we build (materially, aesthetically, spatially) is conditioned by what we believe but don’t talk about. Architecture—despite being entirely physical, public, and experiential—is one of the most invisibly ideological expressions of a culture.

Enter: the Japanese house.

II. A Room Made of Air

The classic Japanese house—the kind Western architects copied and idolized in the 19th and 20th centuries, all sparse lines and wood joinery and the philosophical seduction of absence—is not “minimalist”. That’s the iceberg talking. The surface reads as “minimal,” especially from the perspective of an observer stuck in an overstuffed, over-ornamented Victorian house, but underneath the waterline is a whole system of aesthetics, ethics, that make the visual minimalism of the Japanese house not so much a style as a consequence.

There’s ma, for instance. Often translated as “negative space” or “interval,” but it’s more than that—it’s about the charged nothingness between things, the idea that absence is as meaningful as presence. The idea that what isn’t there is at least as important as what is. That the gap between tatami mats or the pause in a musical phrase or the shadow under a shoji screen is not just empty but filled with a kind of silent, participatory significance.

Western aesthetics focuses on  things. Matter. Presence. Function. Even our spiritual architecture, cathedrals and temples and so on, are often designed to awe via accumulation: more light, more stone, higher ceilings, more iconography per square inch. The Japanese house, by contrast, awes by subtraction. By revealing how little is necessary to suggest infinity.

What’s fascinating—iceberg-wise—is that this aesthetic of subtraction is not simply a matter of taste. It’s rooted in centuries of cultural assumptions: about impermanence (wabi-sabi), about humility, about the body’s relationship to space, about the seasonal nature of existence, about death.

A room without furniture, in other words, is not “empty.” It is full of cultural code. 

III. On Floors That Speak

Let’s talk about the floor, which is not just a surface you walk on. In Japanese homes, you remove your shoes at the entrance (genkan), transitioning from the contaminated outside to the purified interior. Your bare feet are now in physical contact with the home itself—specifically, with tatami: soft, fibrous mats made of rice straw, precisely measured and arranged in accordance with a grid that regulates the entire architecture of the house.

Pause here. This is already iceberg-rich. To have a floor that you touch—intimately, bodily, barefootedly—implies a whole worldview. The Western house (particularly in colder climates) historically keeps the feet insulated through shoes, socks, or carpet. It is made for the standing. The Japanese house presumes that you will be on the floor—sitting, reclining, sleeping, eating. The body’s relationship to architecture is horizontal, grounded, low.

And this architectural posture in turn conditions behavior: you move differently. You don’t barge into rooms; you slide. You don’t plop down on a couch; you kneel or sit cross-legged. The architecture enforces a kind of spatial humility, an awareness of gravity and balance  that you don’t get in spaces designed for standers.

Also: the tatami is standardized—one mat is roughly 0.9m x 1.8m. The modularity of tatami defines the size of rooms, which affects the social choreography of those rooms: how many people can sit, how they face one another, what kind of ceremony (tea, mourning, negotiation, gossip) can unfold.

This is part of the iceberg, too: the unseen relational codes that determine spatial logic. 2 tatami rooms are for storage, 3 tatami for 2nd bedrooms, 4.5 tatami rooms are for tea, 6 tatami for living room. The number of tatami in a room defines activities  with unspoken rules.

IV. Screens, Walls, and Ontological Modesty

If you come from a Western tradition, you probably think of a wall as something solid. Protective. Load-bearing. Permanent. The wall is the thing that divides space, creates privacy, sets up boundaries between self and other, me and you, inside and outside.

But in the Japanese house, walls are often paper. Or wood lattice with translucent paper—shoji. Or sliding doors—fusuma. In any case, they’re movable. Impermanent. Suggestive rather than declarative. They do not announce “this is a room” so much as hint 「とりあえず、ここは部屋にできる。」   or “this could be a room, for now.”

This mobility of boundaries signals a radically different approach to space which is ephemeral and in flux. The shoji can be slid open to make one big room, then closed to make two smaller rooms. The house adapts to context: season, guest, occasion. The architecture is not a fixed structure but a dynamic participant in human life.

Which suspiciously sounds almost like a Buddhist insight about impermanence dressed up as carpentry.

Again: what’s visible—the delicate sliding screen—is merely the detail  of an entire submerged belief system. That belief system doesn’t show up on a blueprint. But it determines everything.

V. On Silence, Shadows, and the Aesthetic of Restraint

If you read Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows—you get a 20th-century lament for the vanishing beauty of the traditional Japanese interior: dim, smoky, oblique, composed of shadows rather than light. The Western mind, says Tanizaki, wants brightness and clarity. The Japanese mind wants depth and diffusion.

And this aesthetic isn’t arbitrary. It’s moral. For Tanizaki, the soft glow of lacquer in candlelight or the quiet patina of a tarnished metal bowl is not just pretty—it’s ethically right. Because it aligns with a worldview that values restraint, imperfection, modesty, quiet. A worldview in which light can be vulgar, excessive, a kind of visual violence.

Again: iceberg. The visible aesthetics of shadow and restraint emerge from invisible values—about humility, about aging, about the sacredness of the ordinary. The Western obsession with clarity, transparency, and light is not universal. It is the tip of our iceberg.

VI. The House as Hypothesis

So what happens when you try to live in a Japanese house as a non-Japanese person? What iceberg are you standing on, and can it support you?

Many modern architects—especially Western ones—have tried to import the Japanese house wholesale. They go nuts for the clean lines, the absence of clutter, the seamless indoor-outdoor transitions. But often they miss the substructure. They replicate the form without the function, the look without the ontology.

A glass box with a tatami mat is not a Japanese house. 

The Japanese house is not a product. It is a hypothesis: about how life should be lived. What kind of time you’re in. How your body should move. What silence means. Where your gaze should fall. What materials you trust. How much of yourself you should assert.

And unless you inhabit the entire cultural logic beneath it, the form can’t fully function.

Which is why the iceberg is such a useful metaphor. You can borrow the tip—build your house with shoji screens and a rock garden and some bamboo—but unless you also import the waterline assumptions, you’re just performing a style. The house won’t behave the way it’s supposed to. It won’t produce the self it was designed to produce.

Because architecture, like language, is generative. It doesn’t just reflect culture. It makes it.

Back to the Beginning - Trenton Bath House

"you just like this cause of the name. if it wasn't famous you wouldn't have come."

"no no.... i really think this is great."

i've been accused idol worship before. liking buildings because they were designed by famous architects. to a layperson, the crumbling concrete block walls and asphalt shingled roofs looked like a dump. surely this was not deserving of a 2 hour drive to visit. or was it?

                                         

i made a valiant attempt to defend Lou Kahn's honor. 

"This bathhouse plan looks like a simple 9 square plan, but look more closely and you’ll see it is underlaid with a tartan grid. see how the alternating 22-foot and 8-foot bands intersect to define large and small square spaces?"

I now started pointing around the various features of the building in a very excited manner.

“the narrow zones provide the square corner piers for entry storage and toilets and skylit rectangular servant zones for changing showering and washing. Kahn honors the hollow square cmu ‘columns’ by capping them with cast in place concrete slab lid like roofs and articulating vertical expansion joint lines at their edges. With the roofs springing from the corners Kahn highlights the inner square focal point of each structure. The roofs seem to hover mysteriously."

my passionate defense fell on deaf ears like a desperate used car salesman's pitch .

k and j were not buying it.

unfazed, I kept trying to proselytize the skeptics. “During the design of the bathhouse, Kahn was smitten with Palladian grids and how to integrate servant and served spaces. “The architect must find a way in which the serving areas of a space can be there, and still not destroy his spaces. He must find a new column, he must find a new way of making those things work, and still not lose his building on a podium,” he said. “Like the great Villa rotunda, where the servant spaces complement the central roof, here the Trenton bath house uses the same organizational and geometric logic."

palladian house grids

villa rotunda vs trenton bathhouse

J brutally cut through all my gesticulations and jargon down with his teenage take. "i can't believe we drove 2 hours to see a bathroom." at 13 years old, he has a concept of what kids normally do with their fathers. play baseball or board games, fix fences, go fly fishing, change motor oil. driving 90 minutes to see a bathroom in cornhole new jersey is not what he considers normal father son behavior.

i interrupted his  "why are we here?" grievances by dispatching him to the urinal, "you should probably go pee and try to develop a sensitivity to great architecture. hopefully one day, you’ll appreciate these experiences…”

it was sweltering. 95 degrees and humid. i never dress up, but here i was wearing a dress shirt. the night before, i worried that i wouldn't be able to take pictures or videos here since using cameras in bathrooms is kind of dicey with people in various states of deshabille and associated privacy issues.

if caught, i was thinking how awkward the interrogations would be.
"why are you video recording a changing room?"
"for the architecture, sir...” 

“Good to know you’re not just a pervert taking pictures of naked people…”

so i hatched a cockamamie plan. i put on a dress shirt with a front chest pocket. i slid my phone with lens poking out right above the brim and pressed video record. i walked around my apartment slow and steady to practice creating architecture video walkthroughs.

there have been times, where i've gone to sites that don't allow photos only to make secret bootleg videos as the security inevitably looks away. The videos sit in my hard drive like taxidermy shoulder mounts on a hunter's cabin wall. my most treasured kills have included forbidden scenes of the salk institute, frick museum, rockefellers’ estate, last supper, sistine chapel, massacio frescos, etc...

nothing was going to deter me from capturing the essence of the trenton bath house for my handful of dedicated blog readers.

anticipating "sir, no photography in the bathhouse. And absolutely no videotaping in the changing rooms." i pressed record and put my phone in my pocket with the camera peeping out. i walked around more deliberately and slowly so as to keep the lens level. There is nothing worse than going to a site, and not being able to take pictures.

to my disappointment, some middle-aged man was in the changing room putting his clothes on, marring my pristine video frames. i didn't want to look suspicious so i walked nonchalantly over to the urinal and started taking a piss. i left and circled the building for 10 minutes. Within the 9 square plan, the four corners and center are voids. You enter the central open air atrium from a corner. A reception desk fronts a square storage volume capped with a pyramidal roof. On either side of the atrium are the men's and women’s changing rooms which are also sheltered under pyramidal roofs. Opposite the reception in this bilaterally symmetrical arrangement is a ceremonial set of stairs leading up to the municipal pool. This set of stairs has a roof, but no walls. In this way kahn worked between solid and void.

                                        

                                     

                                                

When I returned to the locker room, I incredulously saw the same guy still in the process of putting on his shirt. my luck, i encounter a man in the changing room who fumbles buttons and can’t dress in a reasonably prompt manner.

he probably would've reported me to security if i started filming him overtly. every time i went in, i went to the urinal and peed a little more. i did this about 4 subsequent times at 5 minute intervals each. I have several outtakes on my hard drive of my trenton bath urinations as a result. on my last round, he finally left and i had the room to myself. i promptly took my camera out of my pocket and started filming the roof, and the iconic moments of sky over the showers and sinks. what a grand feeling of openness Kahn provided for those changing to go to the pool.

Despite being in the presence of great architecture I couldn’t stop thinking that the guy who I thought was the slowest dresser, probably thought i had the smallest bladder. and if i were endowed with faulkner's talent, i could write a novel ala 'as i lay dying' where the narrative perspective would stream of consciousness flip back and forth between him, the local slow dressing Trenton resident and me, the sweaty small bladdered  architecture enthusiast in dress shirt.

As I lay Waiting for Man to Finish Changing (Chapter 1)

"what's he doing here all dressed up?”
"great, he's the only one in here, i'll feign use of the facilities so as to not act suspicious"
"glad he's gone... I don’t like putting clothes in with other people around. Uh oh… now he's back again"
"shit he's still here, i'm going to force myself to go pee again"
"why is that dude walking around with a phone in his front pocket?"
"this guy literally takes 20 minutes to put on a stupid shirt"
"i feel sorry for this guy. he's sweating and peeing a lot"
and so on and so forth..

I was the perverted dude in dress shirt standing in bathhouse front-pocket filming on the sly. I rationalized to myself, in today's cancel culture. what i was doing was rather harmless.

kahn would've never survived trenton if it were built in today's cultural climate. Pritzker prize winner Richard meier was recently taken down by five women, four of whom were former employees. they came forward with accusations of sexual harassment that included Meier groping their underwear and exposing himself to them. this seems tame to kahn's philandering 50's. Whereas Meier had to renounce his role at his firm and retire ignominiously, during the Trenton project, kahn had a wife, lived with his parents-in-law, had a hustle, and then a side hustle. that is, while Lou kahn raised a daughter with his wife, he simultaneously collaborated with mistress Anne Tyng on the geometry of the Trenton bath house. While Tyng carried Lou’s love child to term in secret in Rome, Kahn engaged in a side hustle with Marie Kuo, an intern working out the bath house entry mural which was based on the baths of Caracalla mosaics. After Tyng returned, Kuo, who didn’t realize Tyng was fluent in Chinese and could understand Kuo’s phone conversations to her mom concerning contraception and was aware of all of Kahn’s transgressions.

within the chaos of his personal life where he juggled 3 children from 3 women and an intern mural designer, Kahn conceived the purest of crystal structures. ideal perfection harmonizing ancient proportions with the integration of servant and served spaces. he made his architecture extra logical, legible and clear to counterbalance the chaos of his personal life.

While all these relationships were consensual, Kahn probably wielded his position of power to gain access to these women. Without cancellation, Kahn went on to design some of the world’ greatest buildings: the kimbell arts museum, salk institute, exeter library, british arts center.... similar in depravity, frank lloyd wright went on to design the guggenheim, usonian houses, falling water, taliesin I and II after running off with a client's wife and being caught moonlighting in louis sullivan's firm. jefferson designed UVA and monticello after serially impregnating his deceased wife’s half sister and daughter’s teenage slave/companion Sally Hemmings. Philip Johnson supposedly burned all his nazi white supremacist papers in the chimney of the glass house, etc.. many great architects did amazing work with very questionable morals. That is, the history of great architecture is constituted by the stunning work of socially deviant architects who refuse to submit to societal norms. 

Having rationalized that my odd social deviant behavior of photographing changing rooms was relatively minor compared to Kahn’s dalliances, i  proceeded to meticulously document the shower stalls and toilets. i started noticing odd water stains and signs of impending trouble where the sloped roof was held back from the perimeter walls. according to anne tyng, Kahn intended the water to run over the masonry surfaces. unfortunately, in New Jersey, Kahn didn't consider the impact of freeze and thaw cycles. Within 7 years of its construction in 1952, the water shedding off the iconic pyramidal roofs on the walls caused mold, disintegration, and cracking. The owners were about to tear the structure down until the county bought the property. For decades, the bathhouse succumbed to crumbling cmu and heaving slabs which were only recently repaired in 2020.

Looking beyond kahn’s cavalier approach to waterproofing and dereliction in detailing, Kahn's bathhouse marks an important change in his design philosophy. If an architect's life is analogous to sporting event, where there are critical moments that impact the final outcome… the trenton bathhouse was the turning point of Louis Kahn’s career. At middle age, Louis Kahn was written off, losing by a wide margin to the Great Depression, with no substantive designs to his name. In the second half of his life, from 1952 to his death in 1974, Lou Kahn came back with a vengeance, unleashing a string of amazing buildings. Looking back at the Trenton Bathhouse project, Kahn remarked it was the “generative force which is recognizable in every building which I have done since.”

The importance of trenton is that it was Kahn’s beginning. And according to Kahn, he didn’t “know of anytime more important than that time of beginning. All the extensions that still recalls the beginning are certainly less than the beginning to think that something can happen when there’s no precedent. And something that forms a kind of an agreement in the mind which says “this is something that it must be”. When it was thought about it must be considered as being always there. It’s a confirmation which comes out of the I commonality of man which is tremendously important.” The beginning is where the ideas were sparked, the beginning is the creation of something fresh and new. Within the crumbling cmu blocks and economically shingled asphalt roofs there were beginnings of ideas that Kahn would work tirelessly on for the rest of his illustrious career. After Trenton, Kahn had clear direction and goals to achieve in architecture. 

Comparing Trenton to his last project, the Yale British arts center, one can see how kahn developed and evolved themes of servant-served, day light modulation, and building planning principles.

At Trenton, Kahn refined his approach to utilitarian spaces and articulated his notion of spaces serving and spaces served. Whereas each pyramidal asphalt shingled wood roof at Trenton rests on four hollow CMU column supports that serve as mechanical spaces or as circulation for changing room, in his British Arts Center, his blackened steel-clad columns and precast beam supports were hollow and served as mechanical spaces to convey air, electricity, and water. servant space is woven seamlessly into served space, articulated and harmonious.

At the BAC, Kahn continued the Trenton truncated pyramidal roof lighting motif but increased the aperture size and introduced louvers for a more diffuse filtered lighting suitable for artwork. Kahn figured out ways to control direct sun by adding layer of sunscreening devices.

finally, the trenton bathouse was supposed to be part of a larger complex never built that Kahn envisioned for a jewish community center that included a landscape of axial pathways on tree lined paths, and a day camp pavilion. Kahn developed notions of how buildings and space are organized in relation to each other. Spatially, at Trenton, each bathhouse room is conceived as an independent pavilion around a central atrium, which is open to the sky. In BAC, each gallery room is similarly conceived as a skylit gallery cell that surrounds a daylit central entry atrium, and double height picture gallery.

 

For the non architects and disgruntled teenagers, Trenton bathhouse is nothingburger meh, for the connoisseurs who seek enlightenment on the ideas of Lou Kahn, it’s an architectural provocation and a demonstration of what happens when architects find purpose in life. 

Hopper House

You ignore the sign that says private driveway. The narrow sandy road winds through the pine trees. The road seems longer when you know you’re trespassing. You see large houses set in the dark forests. You choose to come at night thinking it’d be easier to hide in the cloak of darkness. But in reality, the car lights make you more conspicuous at dusk. The trees start to thin out and you can see the evening clouds. On the left, a turn off for a car. You continue driving all the way to the end. You find the driveway is blocked by 2 wood rails forming an X. You park the car and step over the fence. It’s a slight slope down to a garage. The motion detectors trigger the lights and you just pray there are no security cameras.

At the end of the garage, a set of stairs emerge. You ascend and notice the stairs gradually get steeper towards the top till you reach the southeast corner of the building. There’s a strip of cobblestones at the semi exposed foundation wall. Another short flight of stairs to the left leads to an elevated entry perch on the left corner of the building. From this vantage point, a miraculous uninterrupted view of the bay opens up. Bayberry shrubs flow down to the beach and horizon.

Walking around the house you see a large deck. To the north, a really garish house. You recognize this blight on the landscape as the house that’s been covered in the newspapers. In fact, the way you found Hopper’s studio address was a news article concerning lawsuits filed against the neighbor. 15 years ago, a couple bought the Hopper property and built a 9000 sf monstrosity next door. It was so large it destroyed the view and landscape. All the surrounding neighbors wanted it demolished for violating various zoning statutes. For 6 years the house sat vacant pending lawsuits. The spouse died, the widow sold it to the current owners who promptly paid the town off $3 million to use the house plus an additional $500,000 to clear the legal fines.

There is no vegetation to hide behind. You are completely exposed on a hill. You notice the neighbor’s light is glowing bright and a car is parked in their driveway. You start thinking they are looking at you wondering what you’re doing on their property. Under the threat of surveillance you take pictures as fast as you can. A panoramic video to preserve the glimpse. You start making your way towards the entrance and walk briskly down the stair. You’re now on borrowed time.

You start to think if the neighbors call the police, how long would it take for the cops to drive down the roads and show up? With a single lane driveway, an incoming cop car would block your exit. You make a K turn on the dirt path. Your car is so long it overhangs the road and backs into bushes to turn out. On your drive out, you start mentally preparing a litany of ignorant excuses… “Sorry we didn’t know this was a private road... We got lost, we’re trying to find the beach…. Is this the way to Provincetown?” Nothing happens. Escaping without incident, you replay the scene in your mind.

You start thinking although Hopper’s house appeared to be a Cape Cod style house in volume it was very well designed. The house was kinked slightly non-parallel from the shore to create a dynamic tension between house and landscape. By running the stair diagonally to the side of the house for entry, you think Hopper is a genius for incorporating the sweeping views of the bay as part of the entry sequence. It’s a simple house that makes total logical sense. A double height painting studio that occupies over half the house's volume with large windows facing north, an entry through the kitchen on the southeast which receives morning light, a bedroom facing sunset on the south west and sculptural chimney at the center to tie all the elements together.

At home, you start reading random articles about the house to understand that which was not to be seen. You read about an artist who painted in Hopper’s cottage for 15 summers. He had befriended the owners that had bought one of his paintings in a local gallery. The most exciting thing the artist provides are photos of the inside of the house.

The wood flooring is striped in an alternating gray aged wood and dark stained pattern. Moldings on the doors are classical. Expansive views out of windows bring light to the entire house. A simple sculptural chimney forms the center and hearth of the house. The artist mentions in his writing the existence of an architectural model of Hopper’s house exhibited in Salisbury University, Maryland. He describes the model as painstakingly made. You find out the exhibition occurred sometime in 1993. Dejected, you think morbid thoughts like all the curators who put the show together are probably dead and you’ll never see the model. You start emailing random Hopper biographers who mention the model, but they don’t have the common courtesy to write you back. You enter stalker mode and start cold calling museums to see whether they have this model in their collection or not. One museum you call says they indeed have it in their collection and sends you some photos of it. Eureka you’ve struck gold.

The model is a valuable artifact. It’s like a fingerprint and a window into a designer’s soul. The model is a fossil record from the design process that reveals how the designer’s brain made decisions. Hopper’s model is no different. There are architects who paint like Corbusier, Steven Holl, and Zaha. But this is the first time you look at a painter who architected. Hopper’s model is made of painted cardboard. His loose pencil marks and notations are scribbled to indicate positions and appearances of doors. There are no cut outs for the windows in the walls of the model. Instead, all the windows are painted on the outside with a light blue color. On the interior, the attic floor, chimney, stair, furniture, painting supplies, and walls are detachable… allowing Hopper to insert interior elements into the house. The craftsmanship is crude. You imagine the 6’-6” tall Hopper hunched over a small model, cutting gluing and taping all these pieces of cardboard together. What’s as informative about the model is what is left out. Hopper didn’t model the site, the garage or the exterior stairs. These geometries and views which impressed you the most are not even documented. What’s important to Hopper is the placement of doors and walls. The sculptural chimney. For an artist who spent hours and hours meditating on buildings and painting them… when it came to designing his own house, these are the elements that he focused on in particular. Hopper’s design process regarding architecture is like his painting: hands-on, iterative, and tactile.

\

Looking at the model, you start making connections between the model, photos of the house and his famous painting, Rooms by the Sea displayed in the Yale Art Gallery. Initially titled “Alias the Jumping Off Place", Edward Hopper's Rooms by the Sea was Hopper’s painted vision of his understanding of the world. Critic Clement Greenberg stated, "Hopper happens to be a bad painter. But if he were better, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist".

Rooms by the Sea 1951

Sketch for the Painting

View of Room Painted

Model of the Room during design

The painting shows the corner of Hopper’s painting room opened to a view of water. In painting, Hopper took liberties to move the setting sun to the northwest, flip the door swing, remove the bayberry hill in the foreground. Hopper wasn’t concerned with painting reality, he was concerned with distilling the scene to the raw elements of light, color, water and architecture to provoke a feeling. Painted at 70 years old Hopper sketched the view prior to painting. Two decades prior, he had modeled the house before building it. In 1933, with his wife’s inheritance money, he designed the house they would summer in for the next 40 years of his life.  The Hoppers were frugal. Their walkup apartment overlooking Washington square park in NYC had no heat and featured a communal bathroom. The Hoppers allocated what little money they had on architecture and their summer retreat.

Camel Hump. Past view from Hopper's House

When the Hoppers arrived, Truro was completely denuded of trees. The land was a barren wasteland. For 12,000 years the Wamponoag Indians roamed the same Truro area in loincloth year round… living off fish and shellfish in old growth forests. Within 200 years of their arrival the settlers cut all the trees down for firewood and building materials leaving the hills to look like camel humps. Into this scene you can imagine Hopper, the tall solitary figure walking in desolation quite alienated like a figure in one of his paintings. Something in this wasteland touched his soul and inspired him to paint. “Maybe I am not very human - all I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.”