Throughout the history of architecture, light and opacity have been the building blocks of architecture – and religious architecture in particular. Since the invention of large glass formats, the transparency has been achieved by carving out holes from the solid (the walls), thus creating windows where light could penetrate directly. The natural light works on the inside and the outside of a building in very different ways. The solar light sculpts the relief of the outside walls (the facade), whereas in the interior space, the use of light serves psychological and functional purposes. 

Is it possible to illuminate an almost window-less space? A pinhole size opening into a “camera-obscura”. This proposal relates to the architecture of the early temples in history, as much as to the paradigm that Le Corbusier put forward with the design of Ronchamp. It is not at all like a sculpture enlarged to the scale of habitat.

Most of the extravagance that we see today in modern buildings, where the architect or designer is doing everything in order to be sculptural and formalistic, does not address in any new way the relation between natural light and habitat. 

One could say that the introduction of the exterior into the interior, which was Mies van de Rohe’s fantastic contribution in the twentieth century, is the opposite of the Asterion labyrinth. In the latter, the poetry consists precisely in a denial of direct transparency on the one hand, and the invasion of the space by natural light on the other. Is that a new poetic spatial situation aimed at countering the promiscuity and surveillance through windows and transparency proper to todays’ life in large apartment buildings?

Could this conception offer the possibility of a radically new way of living, by which the human being would evolve within an entropic small village characterized by an extremely personal and secret family life, and a very “un-private” public life?

New York, 2014