Milan, 2019. A tall room, mostly shadow, with a stone floor that had never been asked to give anything back. The brief was short: make the night feel inhabited. Nothing in our catalogue at the time could answer it, so we built the answer once, by hand, and left it standing there.

Out of series

Nocturne rises on a rough iron stem and holds a wide sphere of woven metal, lit from within by a handful of small sources. Around it we set thin copper sticks with removable glass lenses, each one throwing a narrow pool of light across the stone. The spheres give the room its body. The lenses give it edges. Between the two, the ceiling goes dark and the walls stop behaving like walls.

We dimmed everything to the lowest honest level and let the shadow do the remaining work. People came in from the street and stood still for a moment, waiting for their eyes. That pause was the whole point of the piece.

Nocturne was never repeated, and it was never meant to travel. One work, one room, one long night.