Sahar Youdai

 ‘priori’tizing light

light as infrastructure / light as object

Transcending beyond the notion of sight, today, artificial lighting has vastly contributed to the way architecture is perceived. Currently artificial lighting is perceived as one of two components: as ‘infrastructure’ or as ‘object’; lighting utilized to operate space or lighting presented as a spectacle. It has the potentiality to reach even further towards a new movement of design, one in which it becomes an emergent design quality, a ‘priori,’ to architecture, changing the way it is interacted with. What if a lighting system can do both and be a lighting system that is functional in designing space using infrastructural qualities as well as being the object of the design?

Inspired by the works of Dan Flavin and James Turrell, this lighting installation aims to explore the very question of functionality, bringing the two distinct qualities of light to produce an inhabitable space. By hanging forty four- foot fluorescent T8 light fixtures at varying heights, rotations and bulb colors, special qualities start to emerge using the two components of light: light as infrastructure (physical qualities) and light as object (ephemeral qualities).