Light Stream——seeking the last drop of water

The Persian Qanat is considered to be a great invention of the Persians. Qanat is an ancient man-made cave, it draws groundwater and turns the desert into an oasis. The main working principle of Qanat well is that people use the natural slope of the mountain to lead out a large amount of rainwater and glacier water infiltrated into the ground for irrigation, so as to meet the production and domestic water demand in desert areas. But due to the sharp deterioration of the ecological environment and the massive consumption of water resources, many qanat wells in Iran could only be abandoned, it also means that the precious world heritage is fading away.

Mehr Quant is a small village in the east of Deh Barin, a desert area in Iran. The waterway of the Qanat nourishes the whole village for hundred of years. But the amount of water in the qanat waterway has decreased significantly these years. Originally, people can still go into the qanat to get water, but only seven years later, the dilapidated qanat has brought more obstacles for villagers to get water. People must go to deeper and darker places to fetch their precious water, and often need workers to enter the cave from the hole to repair the qanat. For this reason, light has become a much-needed resource in this area, because only with light, people can enter the cave to get water.

Facing this huge problem, we designed a light tube called “light stream”. We inserted it into the shaft to allow outside light to enter the qanat, so that the interior of the qanat could be illuminated. The sun shines into the cave like running water, making the qanat reused by people. Under this mechanism, firstly the sunlight is gathered by the collector and refracted into the light guide tube. Then part of the sunlight will be transferred to the diffuser through a high reflectivity tube, and the other part of it will be converted into electricity and stored in the battery. As a consequence, “light stream” could provide light for the qanat cave day and night.

The light, across the dry wind and parched earth, points to the cool spring. she is like a stream of sweet water, just hidden in the nearly vanished dream, due to the re-reflection of the water surface, the light and shadow of water ripples are reflected around the stone walls, the last water resources in the originally dry qanat reflect the sea. The further you go deeper into the qanat, the more you seem to enter the sea, the more painful revelation you have.