Every day at 4 p.m., visitors standing in the special exhibition gallery at the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Mass., can watch as a suite of Mark Rothko murals age 50 years in an instant. In that moment, a digital light projector switches off and what was a cohesive series of painted panels, known collectively as the Harvard Murals, suddenly looks disjointed. A beautiful, plum-colored background fades to different hues and the ravages of light and time on a delicate painted surface stand out. In an impressive trompe-l’œil, the murals painted in the 1960s by the famed abstract expressionist suddenly lose their luster…

Architectural Lighting, Winter 2015