Inside Photochromic Organ at Santa Clara-a-Nova
At a seventeenth-century monastery in Coimbra, Portugal, architects Alexandra Barker and Reid Freeman spent this spring turning a stairwell into an instrument of light.
The piece is called Photochromic Organ. It catches daylight through the Santa Clara-a-Nova north stairwell’s window niches, pushes it through colored surfaces, and throws it back into the space, so the whole stairwell is tinted and re-tinted in a myriad of colors as the sun crosses the sky. If you walk through it in the morning, the stairwell has one mood. If you walk through it again in the afternoon, it’s an entirely different world.
Using concrete formwork tubing and roofing materials, Barker and Freeman let the monastery keep its gravity while adding a touch of whimsical delight and a little mischief. The piece was built for ANOZERO’26, the Coimbra contemporary art biennial, whose theme, to hold, to give, to receive, is almost too perfect for what Photochromic Organ actually does. Where a pipe organ takes moving air, something invisible, and turns it into sound that can fill a sacred room, Photochromic Organ performs essentially the same trick, but with daylight.
“Rather than translating air into music,” Freeman says, “Photochromic Organ translates daylight into a spatial experience.”
The installation frames the conversation, while also speaking to what it means to touch a historic space without flattening it or pretending the present has no room to add to its story.
How Humble Materials Became an Instrument for Daylight
The materials used in Photochromic Organ are simple ones. It’s built from concrete formwork tubing and roofing components; we’re talking the cardboard sleeves you pour a concrete column into and then throw away, and the stuff engineered to shed rainwater off a roof. The mixture of off-the-shelf and cheap materials creating art within a centuries-old building gives us a delicious juxtaposition.
Barker is direct about the contrast.
“There’s something compelling,” she says, “about taking humble components and asking them to do something unexpected.”
Barker’s broader practice runs on what she calls multivalence in materials; this idea that material capacities emerge through relationships rather than from the objects themselves. Which is a paradigm worth adopting if you ever feel priced out of a renovation. The most transformative elements in that Coimbra stairwell cost less than our Habros Table Lamp.
Alexandra Barker on Light as a Material
I asked Barker about the origin of this way of thinking, and she went back to a family room from her childhood. It had trees and dense vegetation outside, so when the light came through, there was always a new delight to enjoy. Light danced and filtered through leaves, then landed on the walls and floor as the sun moved in these beautiful shifting patterns. The space took on an entirely different character and mood as the day went on.
“That memory stayed with me, because it revealed that light isn’t simply something that illuminates architecture; it actively shapes our experience of it,” she expressed to me.
Why Daylight Changes the Way We Understand a Room
Statements like this force us to reconcile with how lazily we talk about light more often than we’d like to admit. Good light. Bad light. Natural light. Overhead light. Beauty light.
We say these things like light is an amenity someone either has or doesn't in an absolute sense. We can't stop talking about it, and yet we still underestimate it. Barker argues for the opposite. “Treating light as a material means recognizing that it has agency within architecture.” She declares, “it doesn’t simply illuminate space; it gives form to space, alters our perception of materials, and transforms our experience over time.”
As easy as it is to understand and agree with Barker’s perspective, that belief was a genuinely contested position for some time, shockingly enough. Our Western understanding of light’s role was shaped, in part, by Le Corbusier in 1923, when he famously framed architecture as “the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light.” In that formula, the building is the star and lighting exists for the star.
Jun’ichirō Tanizaki wrote a kind of rebuttal a decade later in In Praise of Shadows, arguing that the Japanese room is built for dimness and that a harsh bulb obliterates the very nuances the room exists to produce. In Tanizaki’s framing, the experience of light and shadow becomes the star, and the room exists to hold those nuances without ruining them.
Photochromic Organ lives in the midst of that old debate without getting entombed by it. Barker and Freeman treat light as a collaborator with its own schedule and its own agenda. It's free to move, change, and behave as it pleases depending on the time of day.
For Freeman, that specificity is everything. “Light shows us volume and depth,” he says. “Daylight is never constant. Each day it is informed and shaped by the unique atmospheric conditions of a locale…it should heighten awareness of the unique aspects of a place and work with those and not against them.”
Reid Freeman on Marking Historic Space Without Erasing It
The setting in question is a seventeenth-century monastery that has survived several identities, from religious sanctuary to military barracks to contemporary art venue. We all know use changes the meaning of a space, but some interventions are more graceful than others. Barker and Freeman are familiar with that tension.
“Both of our architectural practices involve a lot of work with existing conditions. It could be a historic home, a college campus, or a landscape setting,” Freeman tells us. “There is a delicate balance between preserving historical context and inserting contemporary elements. The complement, contrast, and dialogue between new and old is where there is richness.”
A good room, like a good city, usually contains more than one time period sharing space. Our need for control sometimes gets in the way, and we flatten all of that into one homogenous look that is often two steps away from inducing clinical depression. That’s why editing a space is harder than erasing things from it. Erasing gives you this fantasy of control. Editing demands that you pay attention to what’s already working, what isn’t, and how to respond to both.
Photochromic Organ doesn't try to make the monastery something it's not. It presents itself in the stairwell clearly as something contemporary, made from ordinary materials, and still somehow respectful to the history and culture of the environment.
Designing Rooms That Reward Return
Barker extends that same thinking to the way architecture is lived over time.
“When we design for a single moment,” she says, “we tend to create buildings optimized for how they look rather than how they are lived in. Architecture isn’t experienced in an instant but over hours, seasons, and years. Rather than offering a single memorable image, it continues to reveal new relationships over time.”
This belief takes the anxiety from the room by not forcing it to deliver itself all at once. It can take its time. It can be better in November than it was in August. It can be strange in the morning and is free to ask you to come back later when it's ready to show you something new.
What Photochromic Organ Teaches Us About Looking at Home
Both Barker and Freeman gave us a simple exercise for anyone who won't be traveling to Portugal any time soon.
“Take a brightly colored object and a white sheet of paper to a window. Hold them side by side and slowly rotate them toward and away from the daylight. Watch how the white paper begins to borrow color from its neighbor,” Barker says. “Nothing about the objects has changed—only the light between them. It’s a simple reminder that color isn’t simply a property of objects. It emerges through relationships.”
Try it before you decide it sounds too obvious. Obvious usually hides brilliance and a whole new way of experiencing life.
Freeman’s recommendation is to “observe a space that you know well that has a window and access to daylight. Look at the ceiling and floors and the reflected and direct light that the window provides throughout one day and take notes and photos.”
He continues, “Notice patterns projected by objects inside and outside of that space and all of the color shifts with the sun’s movement from morning to dusk.”
You may discover that you've been experiencing multiple different rooms stacked on top of each other, one hour after another.
The brilliance of Photochromic Organ as a concept is the way it uses humble materials to remind us beauty is close by and simply waiting for us to acknowledge it. Barker and Freeman didn't invent natural light or color. They reintroduced both to us in a space that is transient physically and spiritually.
And maybe that’s enough.
I bet, somewhere in your house right now, light is touching a wall, warming a floor, ruining a color, and wishing you’d stop one day to notice.
Photochromic Organ was designed and built by Alexandra Barker, FAIA, and Reid Freeman, AIA, for ANOZERO’26, Bienal de Coimbra, to hold, to give, to receive, at the Monastery of Santa Clara-a-Nova, Coimbra, Portugal, April 11–July 5, 2026. All photographs courtesy of Alexandra Barker
