Light Architecture

Light has always shaped the ways buildings could become: from the play of light and shadow to the limit of a building’s depth to the endless warehouse. Light Architecture, a research project by Rasa Navasaityte begun in 2022, starts from a recent change in that history. Machine vision, automated seeding, and low-energy UV lighting have compressed agricultural farming into vertical indoor farming, and the light needed for planting no longer arrives from outside. The study explores the spatial synergies that this artificial lighting brings into buildings: the UV light needed for vertical planting figures the voids of new urban interiors.

In the images, made in collaboration with an image model, the planting is not hidden in a warehouse but stacked, glazed, and lit within communal spaces: glass cases of edible plants along stairs, cantilevered planting rooms in a dark hall, a tower of glowing greenhouses inside a house. Nonhuman spaces such as food production become building parts that interrelate with human activities and stimulate their placing in the city. Synthetic nature and synthetic light weave with aquaponics and micro gardens; the yellow of the UV grow light becomes the signal of a synthetic symbiosis, a potential for nature and people that knits itself into existing urban spaces.

The study is one of Rasa Navasaityte’s investigations into the space between the parts of a building, here the space that light and plants share. It was published as the chapter “Light Architecture: The Future of Nonhuman Space via Circular Thinking for Urban Lifestyle” in Diffusions in Architecture: Artificial Intelligence and Image Generators, edited by Matias del Campo (Wiley, 2023), and continues in Kaunas Lightscapes, where the same light enters the glazed balconies of a renovated housing block.