Composition studio, Glasgow School of Art

The Glasgow School of Art, designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, was the last of a series of art schools built between the 1851 Great Exhibition and the First World War. In these schools the ambitions of publically-funded art education and early architectural science together began to justify new ways of structuring space, particularly at roof level, that in challenging the traditional solidity and closure of buildings was prescient of the modernist elision of the boundary between inside and out. This false-colour photograph shows the luminance distribution in the composition studio of the Glasgow School of Art. Luminance is a measure of the brightness of a surface in candela/metre square, revealing the quantitative distribution of light in a room. It can also assist qualitative judgements such as how the contrast between light and dark and the complexity of the distribution of light contributes to the atmosphere and mood of a space.