SKYCOAT

SKYCOAT (Sky Like Coating Materials for Hypogeal and SkyScrapers Architectures) SkyCoat addresses the emerging needs from architecture and lighting design to go beyond the current solutions in artificial lighting and to recover the integration of men into nature, that is spoilt by the enclosed spaces and by the innatural lighting currently possible in homes, workspaces, and closed areas used in every day life. It has been in fact proven that the deprivation of natural light generates discomfort, lowers concentration and productivity, affects the mood and has often serious impacts on psychological and even physical conditions. In parallel urban planning faces two issues: excessive soil usage and environmental impact of the architectures on one hand and increase in the use of underground areas, where natural light is absent. The re-qualification of such areas is of primary relevance and of main interest for market players in building, architecture and real estate. SkyCoat offers a groundbreaking solution to these demands, as it proposes innovative technologies for artificial lighting that are able to exactly reproduce the natural light and the visual perception of the sky and of the sun in any environment both indoors and in outdoors. The technologies developed by the project constitute a drastic and dramatic shift from current concepts in lighting, where the artificial light is only a surrogate of the natural light produced by the sun and by the atmosphere, which encloses our spaces in a secure closed environment. SkyCoat opens the space through the view of a real sky, a real sun, obtained by means of the combination of two main physical concepts: the diffusing capability of the atmosphere that separates the yellow spectral wavelength of the sun and the bluish spectral wavelengths generated by the sky, recreated by the new SkyCoat materials, and the effect of infinite distance of the sun, recreated by means of an extremely complex combination of optical systems and light sources. In so doing SkyCoat transfers the concepts for physics, optics and materials sciences into real products - nanostructured materials, projectors and luminaires - and new architectural concepts, that have been successfully demonstrated and documented by means of renders, photos and videos.