Angelo Inganni, Interno del Duomo di Milano, 1844
Phidias, Plato
and Aristotle, have they
ever seen
the Acropolis at night?
The meeting
with Libero Corrieri
I
had the pleasure to meet up again with
architect Libero Corrieri at an exhibition at
Palazzo Reale in Milan, which in the nineties
was also home to the offices of the
Superintendence for Architectural Heritage
and Landscape of Milan – since 2007 the new
headquarters is in the majestic Palazzo Arese –
Litta, in Corso Magenta. I used to walk almost
weekly into those huge rooms on the first floor
of the palace in Duomo square, for meetings
or to submit plans and variants that involved
the architectural lighting of historical buildings,
churches, squares, monuments, or districts
like Brera and the 5 Vie.
The projects were by prestigious lighting
designers, in collaboration with landscape
architects and art historians, on behalf of AEM,
now A2A. Lighting in those years ignited interest
and great debates, involving the whole city.
To immediately start speaking about lighting
with Libero Corrieri has been like diving in the
past of a still topical debate on functional and
architectural light, the latter having the delicate
task of returning forms and aesthetic perception
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to architectural or monumental works so we can
enjoy them even in the evening.
Architect Corrieri, after so many years from
our regular meetings and nightly surveys
around Milan, what is your opinion
on this matter?
A premise: until the second half of the
nineteenth century, the cities had only
a functional lighting, and for centuries the
architectures that we now want to illuminate
only enjoyed the occasional reverberation
of that illumination. The moonlight featured
the nocturnal vision of those architecture
and monuments that Goethe and Stendhal
could see in the day. To them and to all the
Grand Tour architects the twilight charm that
had wrapped them for generations was certainly
known. The reverberation of a poor functional
lighting and the light of the moon at that time
determined the reading of urban places,
often giving way to an imaginative depiction,
at times in a balance between the fantastic
and the dreamlike, creating literary landscapes.
But the Grand Tour is far away in time. In the
historic centres of our cities, the life of citizens
and tourists has since long taken possession
of the night as well, and the illuminated
nocturnal cityscape is as important as the
daytime one. In some places and in some
architecture it is even more fascinating.
I would like to try to establish the features
with which you could originally see the
monument and its context. That is, the light
with which the designer and the client wished
you to see it, or the variability of daylight
and the penumbra of the night.
Today, to illuminate at night means taking
th e responsibility of proposing a critical
re-reading. A responsibility probably asking
for, on the one hand, a philosophical thought
and, secondly, a lot of professionalism.
During the day, our architecture lives with
an objective light, similar to that for which
they had been thought; at night, now,
everything changes. If compared to day
variability, from sunrise to sunset, the
nocturnal artificial light usually has a tangible
static nature, as in a museum showcase.
How can we possibly avoid falling into the
personality of the designers or, sometimes,
in the limitations of technology – which,
in turn, is often determined by the economic
engagement or by the effects of an often
problematic context? We must move on from
the objectivity of natural light to the artificial
one, which must in itself be a “critical light”,
especially at a time when our country is not
so obliging towards the immensity of the
cultural heritage that defines one of the few
leading industries in Italy.
Looking back to your experience at the
Superintendence of Milan, could you give us
some examples of this kind of architectural light?
Years ago I had the opportunity to examine,
in the course of many tests, the exterior
lighting of the Duomo, the Milan Cathedral.
In one of the final nightly tests, I was struck by
a situation that occurred for totally fortuitous
technical reasons. The connection to the power
grid was interrupted for a few minutes,
and all the lights in the square, except for
those of the historical lanterns, went out.
The Duomo plunged into darkness, a sort
of “historical” crepuscular light. Also, at that
moment, what could not have been seen
before, inside the Cathedral some kind of
function was taking place and it was lit inside.
In contrast to the partial darkness outside,
the colours of the famous stained glass
windows stood out on a Duomo that, slightly
lit at the base, shaded toward the pinnacles
without ever disappearing into the night.
What was your thinking at that point?
I thought that it was an ancient light, almost
the original one. That suggestion, hard
to repeat, slipped right toward the Gothic