English
Italiano
Massimo Iarussi
I am an architect and I’ve been working with the light for 35 years. Florence, the city where I live and work, has influenced my professional path: my main specialization and my most prestigious works are in the field of lighting for museums and heritage buildings.
I’ve always tried to keep studying, investigating, learning. After many years in this field, I still learn something new at every project. I believe that competence, professionalism and experience are the fundamental values that should be at the base of every practice. But I’m also convinced that consistency, respect of roles, transparency and ethics are even more important than professional preparation.
The job I do has the teamwork as its natural environment. Though important, lighting design can’t live outside the scope of a more general “project” and of a working team where each one’s competences strengthen everybody else’s.
I think, then, that respecting roles is a key tenet in one’s professional life. And it’s because of this that I try being as active as I can in the main associations in the world of lighting, for our profession to be ever more known and appreciated. And for everyone to tell more easily who does this job from those who say they do it but actually do something else.
The studio
The studio I am in charge of is a small one. Few people, but highly motivated.
We like splitting hairs, complicating our lives, creating problems to be solved. We like getting our hands dirty, disassembling and reassembling, contriving and concocting. For this, we have a little, dedicated trial room, our tools, our workshop – sort of a little fablab which we’ve had before the very word fablab was even invented.
We even have our own photometric laboratory, tiny but authentic, where we look for confirmations or refutations to our design hypotheses. And yet we’re aware that no measurement, no metric, no numerical quantity will ever be able to describe adequately the object of our job, the immaterial material with which we work.