100 Light-Traps

Material casts shadows, shadows belong to light.

_ Louis I. Kahn 

In my recent book —  The Empty Room — there is a snippet where I confess how much I am preoccupied with light and space, and of course the love affair between the two. Light needs the space as medium, and space desires light in order to be realized. So the yearning is mutual. 

The excerpt goes as: The empty room waits for the sun all along the night, night after night, every night, so that they can make love again. Together they give birth to shadows. The affair lasts only for a day. The obsession lives for ever. This is the ideal, to keep falling in love with the beloved, day after day, every day.

Le Corbusier famously stated: “Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light.” What if we argue in homage: “Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of spaces brought together in light.” In this respect, the Light Trap is an apparatus, an abstract and quite paradoxical attempt, to create interiority without exteriority — a gadget that tries to capture the intangible. It generates spatial offerings so that light can nest inside. If you will, in a way, this could be a love making machine, and the offsprings are shadows. 

For this short video only 100 variations (from 3,628,600 available possibilities) are tried out. Each iteration is made out of 10 individually handmade cut-out planes, which are overlaid / shuffled in 100 different orders before the light source. The project communicates the distillation of architecture — and its wonder as a pure space. After all, architecture is about space, the experience of the inside; its purpose is for a man to be in. Only through interiority does exteriority become meaningful. The maestro held the same belief: “…from the inside, work outwards. This rule, I think, is equally a law of nature and of architecture.” _ RZLBD

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100 is an ongoing theme/project at Atelier RZLBD that explores serial works, taxonomy, typology, and iteration as a means to explore possibilities, to search for the best solution, if there is any; while remaining faithful to a set of rules, core beliefs, or a modus operandi if you will. Of course, this has been an old tradition among many artists and architects to investigate the creative potential of defined rules to articulate a body of work with coherence.

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Medium: handmade cut-out cardboard 

Size: 18cm x 25cm x 10cm (7” x 10” x 4”)

© Atelier RZLBD / Reza Aliabadi / 2020, Toronto, Canada