Extract from the conference “Showlight”. Fontainebleau, France. 2021

Reading Time: 4 min.

What makes light in theater magical?

In architecture, light is often functional, regulations are required, values have to be respected, but I have always asked myself – perhaps also due to my origins in stage lighting -: “Is this precisely the only light to illuminate an architecture, an object or a building?” To answer this question we need to think about how stage uses light to create scenic dramaturgy and how this light can influence and be used.

In theatre, light is treated as if it were a solid, plastic material, a scenographic element that can be modeled and directed to every point of the space and changed over time. Light and time are two inseparable actors in understanding stage lighting. These two factors come into play in a dynamic, fluid architecture, subject to change.

The beauty of theater and lighting is the beauty of the ephemeral.

Experiments within the dark space of the theater, by Wagner and Adolphe Appia, showed how the unexpected introduction of light created unforseen worlds and realities.

What makes light in theater magical is the way it produces surprising effects, illuminating, in a precise and unrepeatable moment, a constantly changing story. Likewise, light in architecture, to be magical, has to convey emotions and adapt to the passage of time.

Light makes architecture, in itself static, continually changing.

Change is the fundamental ingredient to create an environment in which the user does not feel apathetic but alive, curious in an environment that is also alive. It is precisely this moving light that creates a dynamic relationship between figure and background: the light-background becomes figure and vice versa. 

To give meaning to light it needs to be contained in a form because it, having no outline, would inundate the whole space. This container is nothing but the shadow, the border between what is in the light and what is not.

Giovanni Paolo Panini, interior of the Pantheon. 1747

Dark space is the container through which light becomes matter.

Light enters in this way into Caravaggio’s paintings, into Chillida’s rock, becomes form within the Pantheon, in the patios of houses from Grafton to Barragán to Turrel.

To design lighting first of all we must create a landscape of light in which to immerse and abandon oneself, leaving behind the standardized rules of lighting because these will come into play some other time.

A lighting project arises from the interactions of a thinking and feeling body with the space in which it finds itself, from the perception of its limits, of its shape and materiality, from the images and emotions that this space arouses in an individual. Light marks the boundaries of the space in which the body acts.

A space is lit to transform it into a luminous landscape that finds its foundation by dialectically articulating itself with shadow spaces.

We always think about how to bring light into architecture, how to control the light, but we never think about how to control the darkness, how to manage the shadows. Shadows, dark spaces are a structural element of a built work and without them there wouldn’t even be light or at least there wouldn’t be a light suitable for deciphering and experiencing architecture.
Shadow must be analyzed and used according to its main values: the functional one, linked to the definition of volumes and spatial hierarchies and the symbolic and narrative one.

As Louis Kahn said: “a plan of a building should be read like an harmony of spaces in light. Even a space intended to be dark should have just enough light from some mysterious opening to tell us how dark it really is. Each space must be defined by its structure and the character of its natural light.”

If the light illuminates, the shadow suggests and both are articulated dialectically. 

“Romanticism” exhibition in Milan. Photo by Marco Miglioli

“Romanticism” exhibition in Milan. Photo by Marco Miglioli

To conclude this brief summary of the conference, I can say that to face an architectural project it would be appropriate to study the stage lighting technique and philosophy to obtaim a much broader visual and expressive vocabulary.

Only in this way the lighting design will be no longer approached as a sequence of light sources to be turned on or off, but as a dynamic organism that follows the evolution of an increasingly fluid architecture.

Excerpts from the conference video.