The Horizon of Light Architecture

There are some things that we use and experience every day, but we are so used to seeing them that we hardly ever think about.

For example, light, the light of down or the light at sunset, trasforming landscapes and architectures, changin colours. Then, there is artificial light, generated by electricity, which has an extraordinary power, and yet, this light is all but taken for grantid. When a bulb is switched on, it does not just illuminate, it trasforms shapes, surface, and objects in its surroundings.

Sometimes modestly, “she”, the light, performs the daily miracle of reviving everything it touches. Those who appreciate and value artificial light know that by harnessing its tangibile energy, one can move spaces into penetration, silently, without moving it, almost as if by magic. One can invent new vital dead centers and reveal new truths about the objects by bathing them in an intense or gentler light. Light are the same integral parts of a whole, fundamental elements of a good design. Outwardly frivolous, they would seem connected exclusively to the visual aspects of an object.

The design of darkness is implemented in line with the principle of installation aimed at the environment. It as been an evolution that has taken place in parallel with research carried out by the most keenly felt contemporary art, desirous of mass involvement; also in analogy with the open space of land art, in its intent to alert the enviroment.

The language of shapes, in a dialectic between natural/artificial and rigid/soft, foresses both the linear and informal outcome through the adoption of instruments that can charge the colours and the shutter in order to amplify the scenic effect. Again within the context of “simulatin”, light sometimes emulates sunlight, and other time is colder, in a cogent alternation between calculation and fantasy.

It was “only” a question of illuminating architecture, something that had already been taken for granted by the use of candles and/or oil or gas light, but rather the creation of “light architecture”. Light as an added tool in the architect's hand's !

Lighting techniques have, of course, made remarkable progress from the historic incandescent lamp, painted by symbolist and futurists, to our modern instruments.

“Space is annulled by darkness. If light is eliminated, the emotive content of space disappears.”
Siegfried Giedion