As American cities grow taller and denser — and most everyone agrees that they must — natural light becomes a more precious commodity. Does that mean it should be regulated like one? Or would preserving current sun patterns — so-called “solar rights” — grind real estate development to a halt? Put simply: Should Americans, in their homes and in their cities, have a right to light? — salon.com

Called Lumiere, it's a four-day festival expected to attract tens of thousands of spectators to see the city's historic cathedrals, walls, bridges and squares illuminated by splashes of light. Projects range from LED and neon sculptures to large-scale projections by leading artists and lighting designers from Ireland and beyond. — cnn.com

In his first solo exhibition in a New York museum since 1980, American artist James Turrell sets out to reimagine the iconic rotunda of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in a dramatic transformation. The luminous and immersive site-specific work, Aten Reign, will be part of the upcoming exhibition James Turrell at NYC's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum which opens on June 21, 2013. — bustler.net

A mirror tracks the sun throughout the day, reflecting its rays onto a parabolic dish, which then focuses the reflected daylight into a small ‘light pipe’ aperture. The concentrated light then travels through a series of relay lenses “over any distance and in any direction”, according to the company. A diffuser ensures that light evenly reaches the desired areas. — forumforthefuture.org

Constructed on Sydney’s Harbour’s Cockatoo Island, the interactive 42 meter-long landscape installation, entitled Dune, is composed of hundreds of fibres that brighten according to human sounds in what Roosegaarde describes as “techno-poetry”. — Vogue

The artist intended it to be a display of his love for the city: white plastic bags stamped with the “I ♥ NY” logo lighted from within and glowing moonlike from lampposts and trees in Brooklyn and beyond. Almost immediately, the installation attracted attention, though probably not the kind the artist, Takeshi Miyakawa, expected. — nytimes.com

IN THE hands of Urbanscreen, buildings become toys in a surreal world in which Salvador Dali or Lewis Carroll's Alice would feel at home.

Structures get torn apart, turned to ice or covered with ants and are made to disintegrate, pulsate, morph into strange shapes or become a gigantic pinball machine. — smh.com.au

A bubble is brief, and bursts at your touch. But while it lasts, it catches the light and reflects the room like a multi-coloured temporary structure. We wanted to create a constantly changing lamp that combines the most ephemeral of lampshades with an LED light source that will last for 50000 hours. In the time it takes the LED to burn out, the lamp will have had 3 million different globe shades. — todayandtomorrow.net

Works like the infinity room...are not designed with the end purpose of creating illusion or destabilizing perception. The works...use those things as tools to enable an experience of light and space in a much more direct way than is normally possible, “without...the diminishing effect of a learned associative response to explain away” the essence of what is being seen. — New York Times