city-sized installation by diogo aguiar studio lights up historic square in porto

this is ‘start’, a 12-pronged, red asterisk, scaled to the size of one of porto, portugal’s urban squares. it’s a lighting installation by diogo aguiar studio, intentionally placed amid historic buildings as an agent of imagination, intentionally placed, yet seemingly sentient, like a visible unit of light that made its form visible to us on its own free will, or perhaps like an unaccounted-for photon, in a puzzling quantum experiment.
all images © fernando guerra

its geometric makeup is essentially that of a subdivided icosahedron in twenty equal parts. modular principles. standard metal profiles. six meters each, in length. the details — inspired in part by the cruciform pillar of the mies pavilion in barcelona — create a frozen fractal landscape for the people of porto to stop and stare in. 

during the day, ‘start’ casts a moving pattern of 12 shadows, as the sun moves overhead. at night, its arms are illuminated. they point out and up and down and over, producing diverse, kaleidoscopic lights for those who pass aside and around and beneath it. with all this light, diogo aguiar studio hopes to remind a square of people in portugal that they have the ability to pause time and live in the abstract for awhile.