Designing with daylight: the International VELUX Award 2016

This process, investigating daylight and thinking about daylight and shadow as a real tool in architecture, I think it's something that, you know, seems to be losing some of its importance in this kind of day and age of computer modeling and, you know, very trendy sort of architecture. I think it's really wonderful that people are being encouraged to take the time to use art, light and shadow to sculpt space. In this particular case, asking students to start thinking about the importance of daylight and the effects daylight have of life. It's really important for students to play with daylight to really understand that it's one of the fundamentals in creating architecture. We just don't experience space without it. It really transforms, it leads us through spaces and it creates the environment, the ambience of the space. And what's exciting about these awards is that it's really putting a highlight on that and encouraging students to really take this often overlooked tool in their toolkit and make it the center of their project and the center of their study. Nowadays lots of architectures are built and ignore the element of daylight. And actually daylight plays a very important role in it. So I think it is a necessity to add every element that can work for the architecture to make it work. The theme of our project was this movement or gesture started from considering the minority of the city can change and brighten the entire city so it can be spread out and expanded. Daylight is what makes the work happen. It is because of the daylight we have the shadow and because of the shadow we have something that could change to make children feel it. So actually it is the basic element in the whole work. Our project is trying to fight against the inequality in the city, especially in terms of daylight. So we try to bring the daylight where it needs in the city. Our project tried to deal with the inequality of lights in urban conditions, especially those in low economic standards. And we tried to make our interventions through making a new window which we viewed as having some paradoxical conditions inside and outside. The Daylight in Buildings project took a condition in Korea where a lot of subterranean apartments really have no light or really poor quality of light and was looking for a way to really distribute that light. In the end it's kind of a product, it's a cube, it's a prism that you can slide in and out. But it also really transforms not only the living experience of these apartments which are really gloomy and miserable and also the streets outside. They tend to be in these really dark narrow alleys and this prism transforms the space into a kind of lantern. The project is to add light to the blind people's life using a transformation system from light to the shadow and shadow to something that blind children could feel. We want to raise people's attention to the blind children's life, their living conditions and their mood and their needs psychologically. Maintaining the overall scenery as it is, we try to keep it minimal as possible but we try to make the underground condition better by dispersing the small light entering through the underground spaces. We actually went to the blind school to work as volunteers there and we found that children actually have very limited ways in getting knowledge and so we think that that is not great and we should help them learn something on their own experience. Perhaps they should touch, they should know what light is really about. That's how we come up with that. We agreed all together that this project with a wall for the blind people is the best one because it's so human for us and very easy to use. What really interested me with the daylight investigations winner was that it was incredibly poetic and there was a process there that I think kind of touched the jury. It felt very heartfelt in terms of them visiting these children in the school and actually spending time there to investigate. There was a real kind of level of communication between both them and the eventual users. To really think that you'd be bringing this kind of new aspect of the environment to these people who had never experienced that before, it really was beautiful. Light is about experiencing space and I think it needs a lot more attention in our courses and I think this award helps to create awareness and it helps to encourage students in coming up with far more interesting solutions than what we nowadays see coming from architectural practices around the world.