Hintergrund 31

Description

Miedien facades and new lighting technologies were the main topics at two Az W events in May 2006. A Sunday tour led, among other things, to the Uniqa Tower on the Danube Canal, which is equipped with LED lamps and programmed by the company Licht Kunst Licht to offer the most sophisticated light shows currently available on a Viennese facade.

In the subsequent discussion event “mittwochs” on the topic of media facades, it was particularly noticeable that the high expectations of the novel lighting and media technologies and their potential impact on the city are higher than the actual state of current technological development, and that the debate is very reminiscent of the euphoric expectations from another era: those of the big city discussions of the 1920s. Thus, in Background 31, we circle the theme of “light”: two concrete examples from Vienna illustrate contemporary approaches to light in the city: a skyscraper is visually gathered and distorted by means of interspersed light bands, a traffic junction is contoured by a light band, an underlying building is framed, traffic flows are cited, and the adjacent park is illuminated.

A new cartoon by Axel Laimer rounds off this issue.