Houseof Light
ELEMENTS of LIVING tours Modulightor,
a legendary design house devoted to
inspired architectural lighting.
elements of living promotion
A Shared Vision
“Reflected light coming from
the wall is the most humane
of all light.... It is almost as if
the walls are caressing you
with their light.”—Paul Rudolph
Call it the house of light. Designed and built by architect Paul
Rudolph, the Manhattan townhouse at 246 East 58th Street is,
from top to bottom, a reflection of the master modernist’s lifelong
interest in light as a fourth dimension. The top residential floors
are a brilliant orchestration of spatial layers and reflective
materials that combine to create a series of magical lighting
compositions. The bottom floors, meanwhile, serve as both
showroom and design laboratory for Modulightor, the lighting
company that grew from Rudolph’s decades-long friendship with
businessman Ernst Wagner.
Their collaboration began in the mid seventies, when Rudolph’s
creative experiments with light captured the imagination of
Wagner, who had recently emigrated from Switzerland. In 1976,
using a corner of Rudolph’s architecture office, Wagner began
constructing prototypes—“not all successful,” Wagner confesses—
based on ideas developed with Rudolph.
The conceptual framework for Modulightor was informed by Le
Corbusier’s landmark 1950 book, Le Modulor, which proposed a
sequence of measurements to achieve architectural harmony. Over
the years, Rudolph and Wagner translated and engineered Le
Corbusier’s ideas on modularity into an erector-set–like concept for
lighting. Since off-the-shelf fixtures offered (and continue to offer)
little design flexibility, they sought to create site-specific lighting
solutions that wouldn’t require steep custom prices.
With Rudolph lending a guiding hand, Wagner developed a
system of modular parts that can be combined into a seemingly
endless array of fixtures. Modulightor’s standard parts, luminaries
and bulbs can be mated and grouped so that the form, function,
proportions, dim