A room full of light, a light box for sorting and viewing pictures. The fact that the ERCO light factory uses a ‘white cube’ as a ‘light box’ demonstrates how light can transform, even transcend, a very simple architectural space: This is always an intense experience, but of course no surprise. It is the core competence. However, not everyone knows that ERCO also has an archive of thousands of photos that document unique insights into the world of light and architecture over the course of decades. And yet the approach to architectural and lighting photography is such a characteristic facet of the ERCO brand that we would like to focus on it in a cabinet exhibition at the Triennale Museum as part of Fuorisalone 2025.

Since the mid-1970s, under the influence of designer Otl Aicher (1922-1991), ERCO has developed a distinct curatorial expertise in photography. The "light box" was always used as a working tool.

Initially analogue, as a backlit table on which the motifs for catalogues, customer magazines or advertisements were selected from hundreds of slides, today as a digital and on-screen metaphor for digital media and production processes. High-profile contemporary photographers and the company as client met as equals. Through this dialogue, an independent, brand-typical visual language emerged.

The ‘ERCO Light Box’ exhibition shows selected motifs from four decades of ERCO photography in a room transformed by light. It thus provides a unique view on projects, processes and protagonists in architecture and lighting design - and at the same time lets visitors experience light as an immaterial design medium.