urban lighting system day / night
Location: Chueca Square. Madrid
Area: 1.000 sqm.
Years: 2004-08
Promoter: Area de las Artes. Madrid City Council
Installer: Ximenez Iluminación
The most important feature of confeti (confetti) is that it doesn´t sleep during the day, worrying the pedestrian with cables, lights off, and “gray” structures, but becomes an active system which dialogues with citizens, in a sparkling plane that paints colours on the ground, using the largest lighting source, and the most economical we have: the sun.
The event acquires the spatial dimension of a modified place for producing joy, a funny and comfortable space defined with color tools
Sunny mornings, children play with dots that colour the granitic soil, young people enjoy a snack of colors, and old people chat around an orange circle which acts as a "moderator." Looking up is like wearing coloured glasses that glad and decorate the urban landscape surrounding the square, filters which glad the balcony of Mrs.Vicenta (the woman who lives in the second floor), changing its colour for a few days .
When the night falls, these colour plates are transformed into a bright confetti falling from the sky and express joy, and why not, the festive character of Christmas; it deals with producing an event, the singularity of a fact which doesn´t happen every day ... Exiting the subway and find a ceiling that covers us by surprise, which reflects all the light it receives, and generates a large coloured carpet, on which people meets.
Confetti is a scenery system that works for the city 24 hours a day as a reducing element of remaining light, noise attenuation, and a comedian-entertainer of urban theater, colonizing the gaps through coloured and circular pieces of recycled plastic, opaque and translucent, in which also can be attached photoluminescent particles; so the illumination is generated from the reception in these plates of all existing light sources in the surrounding area, public and private, of projector and supporting lamps, and of course, the sun.