The sense of daylight and shadow was so pervasive at the Milan-based firm Argot ou La Maison Mobile’s exhibition at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, visitors thought that the architects punched skylights through the Arsenale’s historic ceiling. But what appeared to be a brilliantly daylit room was actually an illusion created by a new lighting system that simulates natural sunlight with unprecedented levels of fidelity.
The technology—developed over the last 10 years by Paolo Di Trapani, a physicist at the University of Insubria and founder of the Como, Italy–based CoeLux—comprises skylight- and window-like constructions made up of polymer sheets imbued with LEDs and a thin layer of transparent nanoparticles that simulate the effect of the earth’s atmosphere on sunlight. CoeLux products use a wide range of LED temperatures, from 25,000 kelvin to 3,000K, depending on the model and the preferred lighting effect. The resulting CoeLux panels seem to picture a bright solar disk amid blue sky. This faux sun appears fixed in the sky, as the real sun would, so that one’s movement in a room doesn’t cause it to visibly shift its position.
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