Space is not empty
Every environment has its quality, and you recognise it the moment you walk in. Some rooms you settle into. Some you stand in.
A forest. A chapel. An old house in the mountains. A room that holds you better than the one you just left.
Nobody teaches you this and everybody can do it. It is not only aesthetic. What you are reading is light, vibration, air, materials, geometry, humidity, sound, electrical activity in the walls, the surfaces under your hand, and none of them on their own. It is what they are doing to each other. Measure any one of them and you learn almost nothing about the room.
That part has no instrument and no obvious name, and you register it anyway, usually before you have a word for it.
So we gave it two. A room always carries information: every surface, every material, every device contributes to it without pause. SOLS calls the disordered end of that range Environmental Entropy, and the ordered end Ambient Coherence. What the scale describes is how ordered the information in a space is, not how much of it there is. A busy room can be coherent. A quiet one can fail.
A building can be correct on every number and still be wrong. Temperature in range, daylight levels met, acoustics signed off, handover complete, and it is still the room where meetings run short and nobody lingers.
SOLS began from a different assumption: that the places we inhabit take part in how we live. A room is not defined only by what it contains, but by how all of it comes together.
What a forest gets right
In nature, nothing about a space is inert. Air, water, minerals, light, organisms, rhythm and structure are in constant exchange, and what comes of it is a place that feels settled rather than assembled.
A forest. A spring. A mineral landscape. These may be perceived as regenerative, not because of any one factor but because of the balance among them. No single element accounts for it, and nothing about it looks like effort.
magma13 is our attempt to carry that principle into built space. magma13 itself is passive and draws no power, and it is designed to bring a more natural sense of coherence, material presence and balance into the places people actually spend their time.
One question, most of a career
magma13 did not start as a company project. It started with our founder, who spent most of his working life on one question: what a space does to the experience of being in it. SOLS was built to carry that work forward, and has funded the research itself since, working with laboratories, universities and research institutes.
The company is Swiss and the design sensibility is Italian, and both show. Precision in how the materials are made and configured. A certain reluctance to build anything merely functional.
The approach works on two levels at once. Technical, because magma13 is built on structured materials, applied research and our own framework, MGA-FCR: Modulated Geomagnetic Ambience as the model, Functional Coherent Response as the hypothesised principle underneath it. Experiential, because its value is finally judged in the quality of the rooms people live, work, rest and gather in.
Quiet, not hidden
magma13 is designed to be discreet, not hidden. The housings are aluminium, finished and coloured to be seen. The range runs from pieces you would not notice until someone pointed them out, to installations meant to be the thing you look at.
What does not change is the intent. An object that demands attention takes something from the space, and the space is the point. Even the large installations are built to belong to a room rather than to interrupt it.
