The City as Sculpture: From Skyline to Plinth, 2002

L’ALBA – A LIGHT MONUMENT FOR MILAN – an Investigative Text and Poem

The first order questions that we have considered are:-
What symbolic meaning do we have to help define the idea?
At what scale does a sculpture or object become monumental on this site?
How visible should it be in daytime?
From where should it be visible?
What memory do we hold from the first impression when leaving the station?
How should the monument change the nature of Piazza Duca D’Aosta?
Should the Monument humanise the Piazza?
Should the monument be more than a light sign?

Some second order questions that stem form the above are:-
What should we celebrate about Milan?
How can the monument itself humanise the piazza?
Should the monument also be an umbrella to nature’s own light pen?
Can artificial light compete with the sun during daytime?

An Investigation into Light as Communications – a potential symbol

How have we developed the use of light to communicate during the second millennium?
Light has carried ever increasing amounts of information – from simple warnings using bonfires, to coded messages using solar and moon reflectors, to multi-coloured incandescent and fluorescent light bulb arrays and Bell’s Photophone. The Photophone transmitted spoken messages using sunlight – unfortunately sunlight proved rather unreliable – electrical cables proved more successful, although they did disfigure most of our towns and villages for well over a century.
At the same time, the means of transmitting information went outside of the wavelengths visible too us. These invisible wavelengths gave us radio, X-rays for diagnosis and television. Light as images communicating information has come closer and closer to our eyes. The vehicles for getting it to us have evolved phenomenally during the last period of this millennium. In the mid 1800’s Maxwell discovered that electromagnetic waves could move through a vacuum – light did the same. Marconi transmitted radio waves a mile in 1895 and across the Atlantic by 1905. In 1895, X-rays were discovered by Roentgen, and from work by Gabor on X-rays in 1940’s, lasers were identified as a possibility. In 1960 they were real.
In 1870, John Tyndal, a British physicist shone a light into a spout of water as it gushed out of a tank. The water fell in an arc toward the ground, and the light went with it, following the same curve. Light was trapped in the curving water. The spout of water was a light pipe.
In about 1880, an English physicist, Charles Vernon Boys fired molten quartz attached to an arrow into the air. He made fine glass fibres. In 1880 the ingredients for light transmission through glass fibre were in place.

The latest developments in glass products have stemmed from an understanding of the structural chemistry responsible for the versatile properties of the glassy state – states which extend from the familiar insulating behaviour which we are exploiting more and more in architecture, to the metallic. The classic example of a new glass is optical glass fibre. It represents a peak in our scientific and industrial capacity to create some of the most perfect solids ever manufactured – on a par with device-grade silicon. The revolution in telecommunications is a direct result of this invention. Yet this development, which required several technological breakthroughs, including the fabrication processes to produce ultra-pure glasses and the ability to graduate the refractive index of glass fibres is only thirty years old. So far, the maximum distance that an optical signal has been transmitted through a glass fibre is 100 miles. Its potential is far from being exhausted, and the glass scientists are trying to develop a glass which allows the refractive index to be changed as a function of modest optical power such that all parts of the telecommunications system can function using light and no direct electrical energy.
The age of the photon is here, and through optical communications and lasers, the synthesis of telephone, television and computer is imminent.
This weaving together of the beauty of light trapped in water, to the complete light-powered personal communicator incorporating huge optical memory storage has inspired us to propose a light monument which also communicates Milan’s renown as the worlds centre of fashion and design.

©7 November 1999 Ian Ritchie, London