Antonia Peón-Veiga’s Drawing Light
Antonia Peón-Veiga, a lighting designer and architect, has transformed her passion for visualizing light into a thoughtprovoking book, Drawing Light. Initially conceived as her thesis during her master’s program at Parsons School of Design, the project has evolved into a published work that explores innovative ways to represent light graphically.
chapters and interviews with prominent lighting designers like Douglas Leonard.
The Genesis of Drawing Light
A Deep Dive into the Case Studies
Antonia’s journey began with her architecture studies in Chile. After earning her degree, she moved to New York to complete a Master’s in Lighting Design at Parsons from 2008 to 2010. Her thesis, which earned the Parsons Thesis Prize, served as the foundation for her book. The recognition didn’t end there— Antonia was also awarded the prestigious Richard Kelly Grant to continue her research on translating luminous phenomena into visual tools.
The book’s core lies in its four case studies, which analyze methods of representing light through the lens of botanical illustration, stage design, Cinemetrics, and music composition. Each chapter borrows the structural framework of an existing illustration or diagram, deconstructs it, and repurposes it to visualize lighting ideas.
“I always wanted the thesis to be more than a single copy in the Parsons library,” Antonia shared. “I wanted it to be a shared document—a resource for lighting designers and architects alike.”
From Idea to Publication After returning to Chile, Antonia pursued her vision to publish the thesis independently. However, a friend suggested she collaborate with a publisher to reach a broader audience. Enter ARQ, a publisher specializing in architecture-focused academic works. Over two years, Antonia worked with the ARQ team to refine her thesis into a cohesive book, complete with new
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designing lighting
The book isn’t just a reproduction of her thesis—it’s an expansion. Antonia included an appendix and fresh illustrations, exploring the intersection of light, space, and time.
For example, Antonia’s analysis of botanical illustrations reveals how these drawings convey the passage of time and overlay layers of information. She used this structure to represent light and its interplay with materials and spatial elements. Similarly, Antonia drew inspiration from stage design and music composition. One striking example is her adaptation of a graphic score by composer Iannis Xenakis. In his original work, Xenakis used color-coded lines to represent musical instruments and their intensity over time. Antonia transformed this into a lighting diagram, replacing instruments with light fixtures and intensity curves with scenes of light transitions in an auditorium. “These structures offer tools to communicate lighting concepts that are often intangible or complex,” she explained.