Casa Italia – Rio 2016 Olympics

To make Casa Italia a contemporary, unique and welcoming environment, the lighting project is divided into different levels linked to the different possible points of view. Some signs of light, more intense and defined, are used for the vision of Casa Italia, as a unicum, from a distance, such as the blue line that characterizes the view of the access bridge visible up to Copacabana, while softer and more rarefied atmospheres characterize the interior spaces, to create comfort zones, such as the compositions of rings of light that float inside the waves that make up the ceiling, like a virtual aquarium, which discreetly recalls the Olympic symbol. For the works of art in some cases we used a neutral light, which ensures an optimal vision of the work without protagonism, in other cases we have shared  a strategy that uses light as an integral part of the work with the artist, to give strength to the spatial scanning and to the symmetries and asymmetries desired by the artist. This is the case of Davide D’Elia’s “Hori-zontal”, where LED strips inserted in ad hoc slots, give strength to an ideal oblique plane that generates space. Functional, architectural and decorative light come together in some cases in a single system, in others they maintain their autonomy to configure different scene settings. A significant example to explain how the work was developed in a choral manner among all the protagonists of the project and was strongly influenced by the power of the architecture itself is the lighting of the cigar bar, characterized by the presence of stone walls and with splendid furnishings made by Stefano Marolla. Here, together with Stefano, we changed the initial concept and shifted the bottle rack from the wall to allow the shelf to float on the violently material surface thus the installation became real site specific: the strength of this backdrop manages to balance the sculpturality of the bent wooden counter, also highlighted by the direction of the light beams.