 LightArchitecture: transparency and virtuality
Glass, with its literal or complex transparencies, has dominated 20th century's architecture. This is the starting point of a reflexion on the mutations of our present. From Bruno Taut’s oriental-like Glas Pavilion (Cologne, 1914) to the skyscraper envisioned by Mies van der Rohe in 1919 and realised, 30 years later, as the Seagram Building (New York, 1954-1958); from the Le Corbusier’s curtain wall to Philip Johnson’s Glass House (New Canaan, 1949); glass with its infinite crystal-plan had been used as both an allegory and model of modernity. Not only in architecture, but also in art, just think of the Large Glass by Duchamp (1915-1923); of Dan Graham’s Pavilions; of Mario Merz’s Igloos and of the various mirror devices used by Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama or Olafur Eliasson, there are endless examples of places of transparency and of the infinite game of thoughts. Perhaps because glass is traceless, resistant as well as fragile, and hides a crystalline abstraction dear to Worringer and to the ideology and the use of transparency. As Paul Scheerbart wrote in his utopian and premonitory book "Glass Architecture" (1914): “…without a glass palace, life becomes a burden...” But the passage from a culture based on object and stabilities to a culture of fluids and instabilities, which de-derritorialize place and subject, has created a mechanic and mechanized time, which de-territorialize places and subjects, in a new technological relationship between the global and the local. Furthermore, we’ve transited from the realm of crystal image to what I have described as “flux-image”. This flux-image is at the source of virtual models and new transparencies of LightArchitecture that Gianni Ranaulo has been practising and theorizing for the past 10 years. It is really a change of paradigms, made possible by the new virtual technologies and public information. So “Light”, is to understand in its double acceptation of weightlessness and gleam, where surface becomes a second skin and the visible becomes more and more immaterial, just as in the project and concept of Mediabuilding in Caserta. Here the building is used as a support for information and images projected on the glass surface functioning like a huge envelope. New transparencies are playing with all the shadow prisms and the “entre-deux” of a double glass, whose technological functions are aesthetical, too. Through their superimpositions, multiplications and reflections, glass spaces are exploring this ambiguity between real and virtual, such as in the Wind Lounge at Fiumicino Airport (Rome, 2002). Images and information come alive on a pixelated glass, which confer them a floating and artificial transparency in a night blue environment. In this new kind of enlightenment, internal or external, the spectacularization of virtual flows establishes a dialogue between information, images and streams of people passing by. It’s a whole growing world, similar to contemporary globalized nomadism. That is to say that virtual cannot be reduced to a mere simulacrum or to the art of fake because it builds reality, modifying architectural and urban functions. Gianni Ranaulo’s LightArchitecture is a synthesis between the virtual and the real in their game of ambiguity. The wall, already reduced to pure glass, is now a vector of information and an interface with the world, a “trans-apparent surface”, which can dialogue with the public space and create those “stereoscopic perspectives” described by Gianni Ranaulo. On this model of the amoeba city, always mutating and ephemeral like Tokyo, I lived and taught. LightArchitecture creates a fluctuating and fluid world, closer to fractals rather than to rigid cube-based geometrical models. I still remember the Wind Tower and the Sendai Mediatheque by Toyo Ito, which seems to me close to LightArchitecture, which Toyo Ito calls “Blurring Architecture”. Enveloped in its acrylic mirrors made of thousands of small lights and neon, the Wind Tower captures urban time, its noises and sounds as well as cosmic time in its electronic programs. It mutes with the hours, dancing in its neon lights between apparition and disappearance. But the Sendai Mediatheque is also like a giant and transparent screen always changeable, where an artificial and conceptual light creates “post-ephemeral images” of an Icarus architecture that combines two fluid paradigms, water and surface, in the multilayered lightness of image and information projections. In the John Richmond store by Gianni Ranaulo (London, 2004), we find ourselves immersed in a world of images where we can see -- with the simultaneity of telepresence-- catwalks in Tokyo and Milan, and where glass itself is the load bearing-structure of a totally transparent stairway. Similarly the Virtual Towers project, those towers made of carbon fiber visible like immaterial light rings during the night, would give an image unreal as well as dynamic of the gulf of Naples. Likewise, if the culture of glass presumed lines at the origin of a multiplication of perspectives, like the broken mirrors in the end of the movie “The Lady from Shangai”, the “light” culture involves the continuity of a fluid plan, with its paradigms and its virtual topologies, which seem to regain Kiesler’s intuitions: “...each element of a building or of a city is seen like a knot of possibilities...” Such possibilities modify both the architectural models, which allow to elaborate virtual interactive cities (Arata Isozaki and Miguel Chevalier), and their realizations, which often combine glass and virtual images using different transparent or translucent supports. Finally glass itself has become a screen, able to receive images and landscapes. Jean Nouvel’s “Tableaux vivants”, Herzog and de Meuron’s digital tattoo, dECOI’s or Perella’s hypersurfaces, Nox’s and Novak’s tactile and aquatic camouflage: an “aesthetic of ephemeral” is on display. For this ephemerality is not to be reduced to the present. It is the modulation of time in the event, in the elusive flow and in the intervals of things. Like the Japanese "Ma", which is at the same time empty, spacing and passage, LightArchitecture uses all the in-betweens of a light and suspended gaze. This floating space, modifying the frontiers of reality, is not only aesthetical but also ecological, as in the project of rehabilitation of the Tritone tunnel in Rome. Pedestrians could walk across the central portion of the tunnel in a protected space, where water curtains would assure the cleaning of the tunnel atmosphere, now filled with projections. After Walter Benjamin, who talked about art in the age of mechanical reproducibility, we could say that LightArchitecture is architecture of a virtual age. It borrows new values from virtuality: lightness, transparency, artifices of light, fluid images and second skins. But first and foremost, it explores all the possibilities by transforming reality so that the virtual-line of all abstractions and programming, is now a virtual-world, capturing the becoming in the ephemerality of time.
Christine Buci-Glucksmann (Introduction of the book "Gianni Ranaulo. From Darkness To Light", 2004)
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