Spatial Environments with neon
Ambiente spaziale con neon
Fontana’s “Spatial Environments” are considered the most innovative outcome of the theories about space that Lucio Fontana first expressed in his Manifiesto Blanco of 1946. Here and in later manifestos, he described a new form of visual representation linked to space and time, which would move past the classic materials of sculpture and painting and employ modern technology to create “artificial forms, rainbows of wonder, words written in light” […] Ambiente spaziale con neon had a single red bent neon hanging from the ceiling in a room covered with pink fabric.

This installation, for a restaurant in San Francisco, responds to three large skylights high overhead in a long, narrow space. The design is an interpretation of “extruding” the skylights down through a partial false ceiling and into the more intimate space below. For this project, we pushed our glass “fabric“ techniques (used in the Capella Hotel and the IHG Lobby installations) one step further, heating the woven glass fabric in a kiln for further shaping. This lets us deform the tubes in the fabric as well as flex the overall matrix to create large continuous glass surfaces that billow like sheets in a breeze.