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Giant Lighting Installation In Historic Square of Porto by Diogo Aguiar

all photos © Fernando Guerra

This is 'Start,' a 12-pronged, red asterisk, scaled to the size of a single of Porto, Portugal's urban squares. It is a lighting installation by Diogo Aguiar studio, intentionally positioned amid historic buildings as an agent of creativity, deliberately placed, yet seemingly sentient, like a visible unit of light that made its kind observable to us on its own free will, or perhaps enjoy an unaccounted-for photon, in a puzzling quantum experiment.

Its geometric makeup is essentially that of a subdivided icosahedron in twenty equal parts. Modular principles. Standard metal profiles. Six meters per day, in length. The details -- inspired in part by the cruciform pillar of this mies pavilion in Barcelona -- create a suspended fractal landscape for the people of Porto to stop and stare in.