› SHORT DIALOGUE ON LIGHT AND DRYWALL

– Emotions
– Emotions? … you build … “emotions”?
– Yes… or rather, no… we build lighting devices… yet the objects we design ultimately succeed in arousing those very emotions.
– Like beautiful objects?
– No, quite the contrary … there is indeed an object … but the less visible, the better … if it were simply not there, it would be even better.
– Then where is the emotion?
– The Light itself; simply the Light.

One should always begin this way, with a simple question: why do you want a lighting system? One could almost laugh at how funny, trivial, and seemingly watertight the answers are: “to see in the dark”, “for safety”, “for comfort”, and so on. But it’s all wrong. Truth is, you want a lighting system to have light, just that very light; the light that could suggest something to someone else. No more and no less than when one chooses a tie or an eye shadow.

Once upon a time there was the light bulb, so you needed a lamp holder; then you needed a structure to hold the lamp holder, and if you wanted to protect your eyes you also needed a lampshade. So, the structure had to be more complex and bigger and more sophisticated in terms of shape and materials. In short, you needed a luminaire, and it had to be beautiful, and possibly consistent with the context. But not today, as the light bulb is no more. The LED source is very small, and can be endlessly multiplied in multiform geometries and controlled, if you are good enough, to adapt to all situations. In short, it is a perfect tool. It doesn’t even need a lamp holder anymore, for instance. However, if you want to use such a perfect instrument, you will also want to be able to fully control the beam of light it emits, and therefore you cannot do without an optical system that is up to the task. That’s it: a small, handy light source and a perfect optical system. That’s all you would need, if you hadn’t to occasionally deal with dust or water.

And then there’s another important thing; one can say, for example: “to have the right atmosphere, or to arouse that particular feeling, the wall must be all bright.” That means that the light must flood the whole wall, right from where it starts to where it ends, and not with a ten centimetre black area near the ceiling nor with a blinding light at the top that slowly fades to the ground, where no light seems to be on! Or worse, with those fans of light and segments of darkness, as if it were an accidental graphic composition! If you want to illuminate a wall, we want to illuminate all of it, for real.

Now, I don’t know if you can understand what I mean, but that’s what we do.

I mean, we invented Drywall.

It didn’t exist before, partly because there were no LEDs. Then there were LEDs, but people thought that they were light bulbs; sure, they were smaller, more efficient, perhaps even more attractive, but still light bulbs.
Well… we think that to arouse emotions we have to forget about light bulbs and think about Light.
And so we invented Drywall. That’s it, and if you see it that way, then you can understand it.

Alvaro Andorlini