Light Technology in Urban Design by Katia Gasparini

Contents

INTRODUCTION Pietro Zennaro

WEST 14

Colour in the Ephemeral Times Pietro Zennaro

Colour and Light of the New Rituals Pietro Zennaro

Colour and Light in the Places of Transient Dwelling Alessandro Premier

Light Technology in Urban Design Katia Gasparini

EAST 80

Dazzling Colours: Chinese Imperial Architecture (Beijing) Elisabetta Colla

Five Colors in China Shu Yuâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;an

122

Color Semantics in Iranian Rituals Zahra Javani and Mohammad Reza Moshkforoush

Fine Art Academy, Verona, Italy

Katia Gasparini

Light Technology in Urban Design

INTRODUCTION

“When the sense of the spectacular prevales throughout most of the work, conventional description is replaced by film expedients. Architecture becomes a discourse of events as much as spaces”. B.Tschumi, 2005 [1]

In the 1950s, American, Richard Kelly (1919-1977) created the first “light designs”. Light design was so far an unknown field, so Kelly was the qualitative lighting design pioneer. Kelly’s theory distinguished three lighting functions: ambient luminescence, focal glow, play of brilliants. He applied these theories to well-known architectural projects such as Philip Johnson’s Glass House and Mies Van de Rohe and Johnson’s Seagram Building (New York, 1957). Through his studies and projects Kelly concentrated in a unique concept the stimuli derived from perception psychology and scenic lighting. The Seagram Building design concept was a light tower that can be seen from a far. In cooperation with Mies and Johnson, Kelly reaches this goal by illuminating the building from the inside by using luminous ceilings. The lighting system in the Seagram Building ground floor gave the impression that the building was floating above the road. Uniform vertical lighting in the building central part expanded throughout the tall building . This effect was created using ceiling-mounted lamps and this technique guaranteed an extraordinary evening view of the whole building (fig.1). The result was similar to a light carpet coming out of the building and expanding to the square. Light assisted by electronic technology was the protagonist of the Wind Tower. It was a Toyo Ito project built in 1986 at Yokohama Station. This Tower was a landmark able to interact within the surrounding area as an “environmental sensor” [2]. At the time, this futuristic project showed the Toyo Ito’s concept about contemporary architecture: “architecture today must be a media dress” and it is must design the time [3].

So, the light after the 1950s brings the lighting function to the

amount of technological innovation made on the building facades was inversely

decorative function. This becomes a tool for objects and environment valorisation

proportional to the speed at which it took place in time (as Virilio claims). The tall

and perception where it’s directed. At the first, this task is given to light design. The

buildings facades are no longer covered with ceramic tiles, plaster and stucco. To-

light highlights, enhances and colorize. The colour and light combination is essen-

day they are functional to experimenting the most advanced technologies in the

tial: colour is light, from its origin. It is also true that light is never neutral and for this

digital and electronics field. Now the building facades are just media support. As-

reason it has the ability to enhance (or disqualify if not adequate) a shape, volume,

suming temporary shape it seems that through artificial light architecture and land-

texture, surface and a coloured material. This happens in all areas: from design to

scape are increasingly made for informational purposes only. The use of dedicat-

architecture and to landscape.

ed software and digital displays applied to the building facades, whether in glass, plastic or metal, is radically changing the image and the meaning of architecture.

LIGHT+CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE = MEDIA-ARCHITECTURE

Today, in architecture the information and commercial factor prevail on design, emerging new professions other than the architect who are in charge

During the last decade of the twentieth century, architectural and

of the urban face configuration. Among these professions are the advertising agen-

technological innovation has promoted many light experiments on the building

cies and communication system manufacturers. Lighting or multi-vision designers

facades. This phenomenon has led to the birth of light architecture. Light architec-

are some appellation of new professions involved in the urban design.

ture can be understood both as lighting architecture as a lightweight architecture,

The lighting systems used for media facades and urban screens are constructed

immaterial architectural, interactive, fast or ephemeral architecture until to achieved

with digital panels and Led technology; in others, rear-illuminated envelopes with

apotheosis in media-architecture.

fluorescent, neon or other lamps cover the façades. Choosing one or the other

To clarify, the light architecture relates to the façade or architecture’s artificial light-

technology makes a completely different image and perception of the architectural

ing system design, built through light design. In the media architecture the light

surface. Led technology allows the high-resolution screens production, where the

contribution is more complex and often the light supports the systems for mes-

image perception is immediate and defined from far and near. In a metropolis lined

sages transmission and / or for dynamic images in order to create an interaction

with digital screens such as Tokyo or New York this phenomenon produces disori-

between the building, the urban environment and the people. In this case we talk

entation and visual chaos. It is a typically commercial facades use that nothing has

about urban screen.

in common with history and architecture.

The urban screen realizes urban-scale advertising where digital

Piccadily Circus in London is famous for its bright displays and LED

screens become a second skin of architecture. With urban screen, the artificial light

signs positioned on a building in the northern side of it (fig. 2). The square has been

and electronics colours replace natural light and tradition colourful materials by

known for its luminous insignia since the beginning of the Twentieth Century, when

influencing the perception of the environment 24 hours a day. The contemporary

the signs were not yet electronic but neon (about 1930). Tokyo’s night vision is also

city perception has been influenced by the big development of lighting systems,

exemplary (fig.3): a landscape of lights and artificial colours, which have nothing in

by the evolved performance of the luminous components and, ultimately, by the

common with the natural landscape and cultural traditions of the European cities.

contemporary architecture project development towards the media façades.

The metropolis screens and signs are very colourful. The colours are varied, saturated

Today, the large European cities and metropolis appearance is characterized by

and marked contrast. There are no shades, chromatic arrangements, or special stud-

bright pixels: they are buildings that become urban totems perceptible from every

ies because the only goal of these facades is to stun and attract attention. This is a

place, real landmarks.

communicative technique that derives from the city of signs: Las Vegas, whose phe-

From the light design of the Seagram Building to the tall media-buildings, the

nomenon was analysed by Robert Venturi in “Learning from Las Vegas” in the 1960s.

Fig.1 Seagram Building (ph.© A.Carabini) Fig.2 Piccadilly Circus, London (ph.© K.Gasparini, 2016) Fig.3 Tokyo by night (ph.© K.Brunelli)

Fig.4 Zaha Hadid, Vienna (ph.© K.Gasparini, 2006) Fig.5 Philarmonie Of Paris, Jean Nouvel (ph.© K.Gasparini, 2017)

The main function of light in contemporary architecture is there-

user-generated digital content. That big screen is now at the end of its useful life

fore communicative: “to highlight” an object, a building, a place equivalent to

and will be changed by an interactive LED-wall. It will be a high resolution screen

“showing or exhibiting”, which is different from the concept of making it visible.

and it will provide an excellent viewing from a far distance.

The light in the cities at the beginning of the twentieth century was used to illumi-

Now the buildings facades composition is changing language: from the tectonic

nate the streets and paths, so had orientation and security function. The refinement

language of walls, windows and bricks, to the electronic made by LEDs, power and

of electrical technology has allowed the use of light to communicate from the time

brightness. The set-up is completed by a series of interactive touch-screens around

of the first neon signs and “light architecture” or “Lichtarchitektur”.

Fed Square. It is currently under design. A user-generated content program, artistic

This word was published for the first time in 1927 in the magazine “Lincht und

installations and community collaborations, while retaining the ability to broadcast

Lampe” by J. Teichmuller [4]. So emerged the idea that architecture should pro-

live sports, news and movies, will guide the software.

duce specific light effects and that they could be designed as any architectural element [5]. The light had to become a computable element, an instrument in the architect hands that measured his ability to design the space quality. So emerged a design question, as Paul Virilio said: “to represent construction or to build representation” [6]? Virilio poses a primary issue both in the debate on the new sciences, arts and techniques alliance, as well as in computer-based design and manufacture. Now “urban architecture has to come to terms with the opening of a technological space-time” in which the man-machine interface takes place at the buildings facades and the land plots. In short: we enter the city from a PC screen, no longer from the door [7]. This makes us to see the city in a new way: does the urban agglomeration still have a façade? The phenomenon been developed over the last decades following the IT revolution is paradoxical: the building materials opacity has dropped to nothing and we are facing an architecture made up of structures and curtain-wall. Now the materials transparency and lightness are replaced by the massiveness of the stonewalls.

The prophecy of Virilio, as well as Calvino, has come true: the façade as a screen, the architecture no longer exists. The same concept had already been applied, experimentally and very similarly, at the Urban Screen in Piazza Duomo in Milan. At the time was an ambitious, completely innovative and impact project for Italian design culture firmly rooted in tradition, had a temporary role in the economic exploitation of the yard’s scaffolding to finance the “Palazzo Arengario” restoration in the central Piazza Duomo. Light has become a tool for experimenting to the “build the representation” preached by Virilio. Architecture has become a landmark or simply a support to functional experiment by the most advanced technologies. We are in front of the excess of self-referentiality design. Nothing new, however, compared with the contemporary architecture evolution, where increasingly strange architectural volumes have literally dropped in every urban context. Think of, for example, the Zaha Hadid DE-constructivist architectures (fig. 4) or Jean Nouvel architectures as the recent Philarmonie Of Paris (fig. 5), the coloured volumes of Saahuerbruck and Hutton or the Herzog & de Meuron architectures.

Calvino in the American Lectures in 1985 for the Harward University saw it coming this. He predicted that the second industrial revolution would not

Light is a tool to give visibility to the facades by urban screens or

be presented “as the first with crushing images such as laminators presses or steel

to make media facades for commercial, executive or public buildings. For example,

castings, but as flow bits of “information that runs on circuits in the form of elec-

like the Realities: United media facades: from the bright megapixel facade of Kuns-

tronic pulses. Iron machines are there, but they obey without weight bits.” It was 32

thaus Graz, to the Escape of Creations Contemporary Art de Cordoba, and others.

years ago. Now we are in front of the screen cities and the “blurring” surfaces like

Media-facade design today is no longer an architect’s task. The media facade is

Fed Square in Melbourne.

only one of the buildings components, so it is part of a building system for which

Fed Square has been set up with integrated multi-screen platforms at the building

different professionals work. In these architectures with the architect collaborate

facades, with a powerful Wi-Fi connection and software with much interactive and

the structural engineer, installation engineer, facade engineer, but also collaborate

Figg.7-8: Jouvence, Bruxelles, 2012 - Les Coquelicots [transgéniques] de Monet by Yves Charnay, Magdeburg, 2005 (ph. © Y.Charnay)

many artists and filmmakers for the videos production and the media content de-

tionship with the nature and ambiguous feelings that we now perceive in the same

sign. So the light use and design for contemporary architecture follows different

way by the arrival of OGMs and the massive use of pesticides, makes it threatening.

applications way: light design for valorisation, led panels for electronic screens, neon light for low-resolution media facades such as Graz, and so on.

Today, the concern for the evolution of our lifestyles, the risks that

One of these applications is a digital installation it’s the circular facade of Wash-

unmanaged applications of industrial production imply, makes us envision an am-

ington DC’s Hirshhorn Museum and sculpture garden will be ‘SONG 1’, an LCD

biguous, even dangerous future. So light is at the service of art to make it aware.

screen installation created by New York and Los Angeles-based studio doug aitken

In this case, this is a natural light with environmental impacts, using the materials

workshop.filmmaker.

reflective properties. Many recent lighting installations are characterized by greater environmental sensibility and therefore use low energy sources or self-illuminating materials, such as

LIGHT, ENVIRONMENT, INNOVATION

Light in open spaces, except for street, urban and security lighting,

Even the Daan Roosegaarde installation for the Van Gogh bike

becomes a tool for valorization urban and natural spaces, urban and landscape re-

path in Rotterdam had these features (fig. 9-10). The road is transformed by mag-

generation, light art. That here again, the light design is often given to artists, light

ic into a bright trail at night, like as a latent way, the same painted by Van Gogh,

designers, light artists and other professionals other than the architect, but often

thanks to a technological expedition: 50 thousand sparkling pebbles marking the

work as a team for the open spaces valorisation.

way. Led and fluorescent stones during the day accumulate energy and during the

Artists such as Yann Kersale, Yves Charnay, James Turrel, Pierre Auboiron, Bruce

night they light up. In the evening you will be able to ride between the stars.

Munro, Daan Rosegaarde, Raphael Lozano Hemmer, E.G.A.R., etc. are just some of the best known that in recent years have dominated the nightly scenes of many cities and natural environments. The electronic technologies and lighting components evolution has been critical to the realization of these artists’ installations. Yann Kersalè has curated the outdoor lighting design of the Museum Quai Branly in 19992006 in Paris by creating colourful night scenery in the museum’s gardens. In this project, Kersalè has installed many transparent polymer lamps by optical fibers (fig. 6) in the museum’s central garden. Night lamps create colourful scenery reflecting the light on the museum’s colourful envelope. Also interesting was the installations of “ Les Coquelicots [transgéniques] de Monet” by Yves Charnay, relocated to Magdeburg, Germany (2005) and “Jouvence” realized at Fondation Orient-Occident in Bruxelles (2012). The installations (fig . 7-8) consisted of a series of self-lighting stems made by plastic, wood, metal and paint. The lighting was provided by sunlight filtered and UV light. The Coquelitos represented Monet’s [transgenic] poppies. Due to the title

Contact with the environment and the use of recycled materials seems to be the base of the Paris installation, entitled “Les Anges Gardiens”, by Dimitri Xenakis and Maro Avrabou in 2013 (fig. 11). In this case, a public space was upgraded using recycled materials and coloured optical fibers.The light in open spaces, especially in urban regeneration design, is complementary to colour and enhances its perception. White led light is usually chosen because the light reflects the colour of the illuminated surfaces, from inside or outside the objects. Instead the E.G.A.R. lighting installations make a continuous dialogue with architecture and the built environment. They are installations set up in Renaissance palaces in Rome, Milan, Florence or Bologna. In this case the artistic approach is intimately blended with the cultural level: from philosophy, to the history of design and kinetic art for an emotional high level and environmental result. The installation of A.L.Y.C.E Eye’S on Palazzo Bevilacqua Ariosti in January 2012 in Bologna is exemplary (fig.12).

of this work, installation seemed troubling. The project aim was to establish a link between the feeling of happiness transmitted by the Impressionists in their rela-

C0NCLUSIONS We have learned from history that the birth and development of contemporary architecture are not only related to the cultural and creative progress of man as it had happened in the various waves that characterized the previous centuries (see A.Toffler, J.Rifckin) . In this evolution, research and new materials that technology development has made available to designers have played an important role.Today, scientific and technological research has improved the performance of traditional materials and above all, they also apply the latest “smart materials” to the construction industry, based on chemical, electronic and nanotech technology. These applications are visible in the projects described here, whether they are using the most sophisticated digital technology, or the latest generation paint or simply refracting light on painted or revolving or self-illuminating surfaces. In recent years, research in the field of architecture has evolved into new applications, increasingly attracted by sectors such as nanotechnologies and smart materials. As we have seen, in the type of digital coatings for media facades and environmental installations, systems that are close to the colour and light management for the architectural envelope and the built environment, which use in most cases films or “intelligent” systems [8]. In addition, along with the most advanced technologies, has developed increased sensitivity for environmental sustainability and recycling. Product innovation, at the same time, also corresponds to an innovative thinking in terms of creativity, leading to the blend of technologies, new materials and components or recycled objects. And light has become a fundamental tool for achieving these goals.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Calvino I., Lezioni Americane, Verona, Mondadori, 1993 Fed Square Pty Ltd, “Fed Square’s New Digital Experience Initiative”, www. fedsquare. com/fed-squares-new-digital-experience-initiative (29/09/2017) Gasparini K., Schermi Urbani, Wolters Kluwer, Milano, 2012 Gasparini K., Media Environment. New technologies and tools for built environment communication and valorization, K.Gasparini, edited by. In Screencity-International Academic journal, ISSN 2281-2210, n. 01, ISBN 978-88-9637-010-0 Gasparini K., “Media façades and the immersive environments. Connections and Interactions Between the Real and Virtual World to Create Immersive Environments”, In: Wolkenkuckucksheim, International Journal of Architectural Theory,Vol. 19, Issue 33, 2014, p. 251–263, ISSN 1434 - 0984 Gasparini K., “Media surfaces design for urban regeneration. The role of color and light for public place usability”, in JAIC – Journal of the International Colour Association, n.17/2017 Ito T., “L’immagine dell’architettura nell’era elettronica”, in Domus, n. 800, 1998 Merlino S., “In bicicletta in un quadro di Van Gogh”, 29/01/2015, in www.ehabitat. it/2015/01/29/pista-ciclabile-dedicata-a-van-gogh6536/ (29/09/2017) Premier A., “Chromatic environmental integration of architectural surfaces: technologies and case studies” in M. Rossi, D. Casciani, editors, Colour and Colorimetry, Vol. XI B, Proceedings of the 11th Conferenza del Colore”, Gruppo del Colore, Milano, 2015, ISBN 978-88-99513-01-6, pp. 211-219 Premier A. Gasparini K., “Sustainable colour design in architecture: materials, technologies and products”, in Journal of the International Colour Association, 2017, ISSN 2227-1309, N. 19, pp. 34-46 Oechslin W., “Architetture luminose” in AA.VV. Espressionismo e nuova oggettività. La nuova architettura europea degli anni Venti, Electa, Milano, 1994 Tschumi B., Architettura e disgiunzione, edited by Damiani G., Baiocco R., Pendragon, Bologna, 2005 Virilio P., L’espace critique, C.Bourgois Editeur, 1984

REFERENCES [1] Tschumi B., Architettura e disgiunzione, a cura di G. Damiani e R. Baiocco, Pendragon, Bologna, 2005, p.118 [2] Gasparini K., Schermi Urbani, Wolters Kluwer, Milano, 2012, p. 61 [3] Ito T., “L’immagine dell’architettura nell’era elettronica”, in Domus, n. 800, 1998 [4] Oechslin W., “Architetture luminose” in AA.VV. Espressionismo e nuova oggettività. La nuova architettura europea degli anni Venti, Electa, Milano, 1994, pp. 97-106 [5]ibidem [6] Virilio P., L’espace critique, C.Bourgois Editeur, 1984 [7] Virilio P., op.cit, p.11 [8] Gasparini K., op.cit., cap.10

Katia Gasparini Architect, Ph.D, Professor at Fine Art Academy in Verona and IED in Venice; was professor at Iuav University of Venice and Politecnico di Milano. Invited lecturer at international workshops and conferences. Research activities focused on colour and light design for urban regeneration and cultural heritage valorisation, innovative and smart materials for architecture (kinetic and media facade). Freelance architect and consultant on the same topics for public and private clients. Author of more than 100 national and international publications. Contact: katia@katiagasparini.it

Fig.11 Les Anges Gardiens, by Dimitri Xenakis and Maro Avrabou, Paris, 2013 (ph.© K.Gasparini, 2017) Fig.12 A.L.I.C.E’S Eye, Palazzo Bevilacqua Ariosti, Bologna, 2012, ELASTIC Group of Artistic Research (ph.© K.Gasparini)