Light Festival Barcelona
Professors
Silvia Alonso de los Rios
Classroom
C-B8
Timetable
Tuesday 08:00 - 10:00
Introduction
This course is dedicated to light and the [in]visible, the theme of the 2027 edition of Llum BCN: there is a spectrum of light that human beings cannot see. We distinguish between the invisible, what cannot be seen (air, sound, temperature, memory, the relationships that sustain a place), and the in-visible, what remains inside the visible without our noticing it, what we look at every day and no longer see. In Walter De Maria's The Lightning Field, four hundred steel poles stand in the New Mexico desert as a field of signs that only the light of lightning completes. Art and architecture are the tools that make the invisible visible.
The course takes its approach from Cities and Signs, a series in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities in which the traveler finds not things but figures that point to other things. Every city can be read like a text: Barthes read it as a discourse, Lynch measured it by its legibility, and Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour learned in Las Vegas that the sign could prevail over form. Yet a perfectly legible city may also be a city that refuses to be known. At night, the city is reduced to its luminous signs, and light becomes an ambivalent material: it can be one more sign in the noise of the city, or the instrument that suspends that noise. Students will work with three positions: reading the signs a place already holds, overwriting them, or erasing them.
The assignment is to design and build an ephemeral light installation for Llum BCN 2027, from February 5 to 7, in the plaza of L'Auditori de Barcelona, designed by Rafael Moneo, on the edge of Poblenou. In a district that is a palimpsest of industrial and technological signs, L'Auditori is an almost silent building, as its form and place in the city suggest. Each proposal will build another invisible city, with its own name and a single decisive idea, at full scale and open to the public for three nights.
Program
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