When an idea becomes light

July, 9th, 2026

A few months ago, we took part in an ambitious competition alongside a truly outstanding team of partners, and we’re proud to share that the project made it into the top 5 of the final ranking. We became genuinely attached to the idea and the lighting concept behind it, and felt it was worth sharing. The GAM building, Turin’s Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, is one of the most significant examples of postwar modern museography, and the project respects its architectural identity while renewing it through contemporary languages and technologies. At the heart of the new urban configuration is a new entrance, inspired by the dynamic lines of Turin Futurism, becoming a symbolic threshold between public space and the world of art. The lighting design is built around a single idea: the dynamic interplay between light and darkness, the contrast between volumes in light and volumes in shadow.  By day, natural sunlight illuminates the surfaces of the building’s outer shell, revealing a composition of overlapping monolithic volumes in an alternation of solids and voids, of light and shadow. By night, this relationship reverses: artificial light, carefully designed and positioned at specific points, illuminates the areas previously left in shadow, visually separating the concrete volumes and creating what becomes almost a negative image, lending the volume lightness and plasticity, and shaping a striking nocturnal scene. Not every idea gets built, but some are worth telling anyway, and this is one of them.

TEAM

Architect: ACPV ARCHITECTS
Lighting Design: Metis Lighting
Landscape Design: LAND
Engineering: DBA
Exhibition Design: ArtCloud
Visual & Brand Identity: Fionda

Modern Heritage Conservation: Arch. Alberto Artioli
Museography: Arch. Beatrice Zanelli

Render courtesy by ACPV ARCHITECTS