Light Plot for Traveler: Ten Meditations on Italo Calvino’s Literary Worlds

EXHIBITION DESIGN COURSEWORK

Vectorworks

Traveler: Ten Meditations on Italo Calvino’s Literary Worlds, is a series of immersive experiences that allow viewers to enter a work of fiction and explore the nature of reading. The first station of the exhibition serves as an entry point to the other nine. Visitors should have a sense of crossing a threshold into a place where words on a page become concrete realities. In order to accomplish this, the lighting here will be distinctly different from the lighting in the other side of the entryway and the lighting in the atrium beyond.

The lighting design will reinforce the sense that the doorway and stairs, pictured here, are actually a bridge to the world described in the book. There are large windows on the 17th Street side of the building. During the day, this entry area is brightly lit by the sun, and the impact of lighting design is minimal. Visitors viewing the exhibition at night will encounter a more controlled experience than those visiting during the day. The scene visible “through” the doorway will consist of printed imagery over which the moving silhouette of a traveler is projected. It will appear as though the traveler is moving toward the viewer. The color and distribution of the light will change slowly in order to indicate changing conditions in the world beyond the door.