ETS4 - Light and Lighting

Light animates and reveals architecture. Architecture cannot fully exist without light, since without light there would be nothing to see.Yet in architectural design light is usually either expected from nature or developed as an add-on attachment very late in the design process.The course explores the symbiotic relationship between architecture and light. As much as light can reveal architecture, architecture can animate light, making it bounce, scatter, refract, altering its spectrum and colour perception, absorbing it or reflecting it, modulating its path and strength in both space and time.It aims at developing a sensibility and intuition to the qualities of light, whilst giving the physical and computational tools to explore and validate design ideas.The course will start from the science of light and gradually move to the art and design domains, with a final outlook to the role of light as information and connectivity enabler. During the lectures, theoretical discussions will be alternated to physical experiments and individual or team exercises.