Dear readers, EXPOs are increasingly becoming a training ground where the best architects can propose new ideas for architectural spaces and new technologies to put them into practice. In recent years, light has become nothing less than a “material” able to create spaces and architectures, overcoming the simple functional role assigned to it in the past. The Shanghai EXPO is an obvious example. Today light should be considered a material able to create architecture, such as bricks, concrete, glass and steel. In the past this role was limited to the use of natural light, from the Crystal Palace, made of glass and steel, by Paxton in 1851, to the chapel at Ronchamp by Le Courbusier, which are examples that everyone is familiar with. Today artificial light technologies, such as new discharge lamps, LEDs, OLEDs, LASERs are controlled by increasingly sophisticated computerised systems producing effects and situations which until a few years ago were limited to the cinema. But all of this should be supported by a precise strategy which we have clearly expressed for several years now in our advertising campaign “Better light for a better life”. A phrase that calls to mind the motto of EXPO 2010: “Better City, Better Life”.
Adolfo Guzzini