“It is not the celebration of a functionalist architecture; I was seeking that immaterial quality of space, the abstract dimension that runs invisibly through all his work”.

Asilo d’infanzia Sant’Elia, Como, Giuseppe Terragni, 1936-37. Photo: Luisa Lambri

Light is one of the most fascinating elements in Luisa Lambri’s work, which she often changes digitally: liquid electronic blue, rays of light, transparencies, toning and white. It is an immaterial state, fluctuating like perceptions; it is the light of the soul, unnatural, mystical and almost divine.

The relationship between natural and artificial is an important concept in Luisa Lambri’s work: the natural space of the building is transformed into an artificial – mental – landscape. The light and colour seem to be the fabric of the walls; on the one hand, they mark the boundaries of its territory and, on the other, they are a necessary characteristic to describe it.

Villa in the forest of Tateshina, Kazuyo Sejima, 1995. Photo: Luisa Lambri

“The spaces that interest me are almost abstract; they are voids that need a human presence that can complete them. Memories are concentrated in every detail, in every line”.

Photographing architecture is in itself a paradox. Photography subtracts from architecture its corporeity and functionality, all material substance, to give it a state made purely of light.

Transporting architecture into an immaterial world does not require the elimination of its three-dimensionality, but a rereading of it through the photographic shot. The forms and the lines restrained by photography free themselves and flow into an evocative space. They reach an ethereal place where only the Idea of architecture exists and they reconstruct a fine weave of rooms of the soul and invisible houses. For the first time, with this most recent cycle she approached a living architect to once more photograph virtual interiors.