48|PROTAGONISTA Grand Canal nightscape in Hangzhou, China / Lighting design : Roger Narboni, CONCEPTO & Zhongtai Lighting Group © CONCEPTO & Zhongtai W hat is light for Roger Narboni? Natural and artificial lights are for me fantastic materials and mediums that still astonished me in term of innovation, potentialities and creativity. Why did you choose the world of lighting as your professional field? When did your interest for lighting begin? I have worked first as an oil painter playing with light and transparent colored layers (from 1972 to 1981) and then as an artist using light in sculptures and sensorial spaces that I designed and proposed to Art centers and Art galleries (from 1981 to 1986). The spaces I designed with light and other materials such as industrial glass panels were already quite monumental and they became bigger and bigger and I felt that I could not going on doing this kind of interior spaces. I found out that the city outside with all its architectures, landscapes and public spaces could be a fantastic game field to express my ideas and desires. I never liked this world (and market) of official Art where at that time light was not recognized as an Art medium. I wanted to work in cities and for the people living there. And it is why I decided to use my creativity, approaches and theories about light and lightings in the urban environment field and I created in 1987, in France, this profession of lighting designer dedicated to urban lighting and lighting master planning. In 1987, you founded the studio “CONCEPTO”, dedicated to the design of urban, landscape and architectural lighting projects at large scales. How has your profession changed since then? It has totally change in fact. Now as a lighting designer we have to deal with a lot of constraints, sometime contradictory: norms and regulations, energy savings needs, environmental issues, protection of nocturnal biodiversity, very low budgets for design fees and construction works, concurrency of the big engineering offices, safety and security demands. But I think also that these new constraints offer a chance to all of us to reinvent and to redefine our profession in the future, because this profession was born in a quite idyllic period that will never come back. A few months ago, you told us, at a conference held in Barcelona, that LED technology had changed urban lighting. What are the new tendencies on this type of lighting and in contemporary architecture? Well, LEDs are everywhere now. This technology give us the opportunity to create urban lightings with new kind of fixtures and furniture, smaller, more aesthetic and more integrated. It offers us new uses of colors if we can master them instead of using predigest RGB color programs. It is also a digital technology closed and linked to all our new digital world. And that was not the case with the old technologies such as discharge or fluorescent lamps for example. In the contemporary architecture, I think that the potential that offer