František Kupka , Katedrála ( Cattedrale / The Cathedral ), 1912-13 , Collezione Jan e Meda Mládek , Museo Kampa Praga / Jan and Meda Mládek collection of Museum Kampa in Prague flaunted lumen / watt ratios , which are a winner from the point of view of management consumption ( watts / m ²) but at the expense of the quality of light , the pleasantness of the living room and the visual tasks to be performed , if not the overall design leads to the conclusion that :
• no light source ( incandescent , fluorescent , sodium , mercury , halogen or light-emitting diode ) is in itself good or bad , useful or useless and productive or not ;
• no luminaire is , in itself , beautiful , ugly , useful or useless ...
Not only measure but also illuminate
I had entered an inn towards evening , and , as a well-favoured girl , with a brilliantly fair complexion , black hair , and a scarlet bodice , came into the room , I looked attentively at her as she stood before me at some distance in half shadow . As she presently afterwards turned away , I saw on the white wall , which was now before me , a black face surrounded with a bright light , while the dress of the perfectly distinct figure appeared of a beautiful sea-green . J . Wolfgang Goethe , Theory of Colours
For millennia , sunlight has illuminated human life , aided , after sunset , by the flame of torches , candles and oil lamps . Its emission spectrum is the most recognisable and comfortable to our eyes , and its presence has a beneficial influence on the mood of human day and , to this day , it conditions the daily cycle of waking and sleeping in modern metropolises . The first technological evolution - with respect to the flame - in artificial lighting is very recent and dates back to 1879 when T . A . Edison , with the improvement of the carbon filament lamp and the possibility of distributing energy over the urban grid , gave way to the modern technology of electric lighting . The evolution of the lamp has had the same fate and growth as all the technologies that have developed from the industrial revolution to the present day , following the path that led lighting sources from carbon filament to halide vapour . Instead , we have to wait until the rationalism of the 1930s for the first functional lighting fixtures .
Until that time , in fact , all lighting sources mimicked , both formally and technologically , the pre-existing candle or oil lamps . From the 1930s to the present day , the technology of the luminaires , although very advanced , has been adapting to the light sources that came into use from time to time , which were equipped with more or less compact optics and components , and has neither been substantially renewed nor , above all , undergone profound changes and conceptual revolutions . While acknowledging the luminaire manufacturers ’ many merits , such as capacity for research and evolution , use of increasingly sophisticated materials and keeping pace with technological progress , their efforts to break free from the luminaire itself ( from the concept of the “ luminaire ”, therefore ) do not seem as significant . Probably a much more complex discourse opens up to reflection on both the lack of stimuli and creativity on the part of designers ( who are , moreover , committed , from time to time , to very specific and different problems ), and the generalised lack of lighting culture . Finally , lighting design , which also came into being at the same time as the rationalism of the 1930s , once it had established a correct and comprehensive calculation methodology with regard to existing sources and their relationship to spaces , did not add any more general , broad and cultural concepts to the lighting problem . It is probably not the task of a “ technique ” to solve the greater problems that persist upstream . However , very often and sadly , we witness
If the use of a light source is the right one with respect to the luminaire ( an extended light source such as a fluorescent tube is poorly usable in a spotlight , where a point source such as a halogen lamp will give greater yield ) and the luminaire , in turn , is well constructed and functional with respect to the environmental location and the visual tasks to be performed , we can say that the fundamental rules of lighting design have been met ( once the economy of the lighting installation , management and maintenance have been complied with ). Furthermore , precisely because of its rationalist origins , lighting design considers optimal comfort standards , which are no longer relevant today , such as homogenous light distribution , absence of shadows and glare limitation , to the extreme . As a result of an increased awareness of nature and environment , the concepts of discontinuity and nonhomogeneity are to be favoured today . The light of a forest or a sunset on a lake , according to lighting orthodoxy , are certainly not examples of visual comfort : the former has considerable discontinuity , glare and shadow effects ; a sunset on a water surface is clearly backlit and should generate a very strong visual discomfort . In reality , the light of a forest or a sunset attracts us : uniformity creates monotony , and monotony generates anxiety , the opposite of comfort . Lighting design should be part of the environmental culture , interpreting the history , the architecture and the philosophy underlying the spaces in which it is switched on and that it brings to live . Throughout our western history , architecture has been built in close relationship with its surroundings , albeit constrained by cultural parameters specific to each era . The relationship with natural daylight is , everywhere and always , clearly legible : think of the organisation around the impluvium of a Roman house , of the structure of a Renaissance dwelling in which the window aperture narrows in the upper floors , of the strongly projected and mystical light that , in a Gothic cathedral , a rose window lets in . The task of lighting design , to date , would then seem to be not only implementing the integration of artificial light in the spaces in which man lives , but also optimising the performance of the visual tasks required by the various activities by allowing the right intensity and distribution of flux , comfort , good colour vision and absence of annoying glare or unnatural monotony , both within buildings and within the urban structure that we can consider the collective residence of modern man .
LUCE 60 / LUCE 342 23