The Daylight Award 2022 was presented via webcast. Apart from the winners, guests, and a small audience, there were only projection screens and soft sunlight. This atmosphere made the awards ceremony. More like a symposium, the theme is: Warmth.
The Daylight Award is an award sponsored by the VELUX Foundation, a building material manufacturer, and is held every two years. The former is awarded to architects or architectural firms who use daylight flexibly in architecture, and the latter is awarded to scholars outside the field of architecture who conduct in-depth research on daylight itself. This year's Architectural Daylight Prize winners are Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, founders of Irish firm Grafton Architects, who are also 2020 Pritzkers Architecture Prize Winner.

2022 Daylight Architecture Award Winners Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara. Photo: The Daylight Award

Their design perspective is more like that of a mother than a completely sane architect's perspective. Before people are born, they are wrapped by a warm mother, and when they grow up, what wraps them is architecture. They hope that people can also feel warmth in the building. Sunlight plays a vital role. Architects should face up to this relationship and apply it to their designs, rather than letting people live in Lightning flooded or dark and cold environments.

Kingston University. Photo:Dennis Gilbert

Their ideas are on full display in landmark cases like the Learning Centre at Kingston University in London. The entire building covers an area of about 9,400 square meters, with libraries and archives, professional studios, theaters and self-study spaces, cafes, creative centers, etc., which are typical European cultural and educational complex buildings. The service object is not only for the students of the school, but also provides a variety of cultural and educational services for alumni and community personnel.

University Campus UTEC. Photo:Iwan Baan

In this building, four light halls run through the core functional areas in four directions, so that the presence of natural light can be felt everywhere. On the outside of the façade adjacent to the entrance, a matrix-type high-clearance frame is set up. The shape, density, and height of these frames are simulated and adjusted many times during the design, creating a bright space that is diametrically opposite to the gray space commonly used in buildings to distinguish indoor and outdoor, and more novel transition processing for the entrances and exits of each floor. It enables students to feel the warmth and safety of being surrounded by sunlight and buildings while studying here.
The idea of introducing natural light directly into the interior also appears in another of their works, which will be completed in 2021, the teaching building of the French National Higher School of Mining and Telecommunications. This is a super educational and cultural complex with a construction area of more than 40,000 square meters. It not only covers the teaching space of several school alliances, but also includes shared laboratories, theaters and other comprehensive indoor spaces.

Bocconi University. Photo:Iwan Baan

Grafton Architects individually designed a set of self-consistent expression logic for this building, that is, from the ground to the top, no matter the function, space or facade, it gradually changes from simple to complex. This gradient logic not only traces several classic European architectural languages and proportional habits in form, such as the ancient Greek colonnade, the gable of the Cathedral of Maggiore in Italy, the interior language of Trinity College in Ireland, and the Royal Palace in France, but also breaks these classics. For the shielding of sunlight in the case, a more refined patio and side penetration structure are used, as well as a floor-to-ceiling curtain wall that changes with the structure.
This whole logic of changing floor-to-floor and bringing in daylight also applies to the Marshall Building at the London School of Economics, which opens in 2022. The surrounding environment of this teaching building with a construction area of 18,000 square meters is cramped. If the structure of the high-rise core tube is directly adopted, the relationship with the surrounding environment will be destroyed. For complex spaces such as cultural activity space, how to cleverly solve the connection between functions becomes the key to the design.

Institut Mines-Télécom. Photo:Philippe Ruault

Through on-the-spot investigation, the architect first simplified the landing lobby part, including the relationship with the layered line of the surrounding buildings. In the rhythm change of the floor-by-floor ascending, the two parts of the east and west main buildings were twisted, and the direction of the twist was carried out with the surrounding buildings. echo. In doing so, let twist also create cavities that serve as channels for sunlight to enter. Then the architect opened up a semi-open public space above the lobby facing the street, which incorporates sunlight, as a common communication space and traffic digestion space for various cultural and educational spaces. Finally, to break the limitation of space arrangement brought by the traditional column net, they used the beam column divergent structure to minimize the possibility of the space on each floor being occupied by the structure. These beam columns in the atrium part look like a A plain concrete tree growing from the ground.
There are not many cultural and educational complex buildings in China that accept community personnel and students at the same time. The above three examples are very worth learning from. The two female founders of Grafton Architects repeatedly emphasized the intervention of sunlight in their exploration of this type of architecture, and also expressed their intention to bring warmth to the people who use the building, not to mention them. Buildings are mostly used by people who come to study.

Anna Wirz-Justice, winner of the 2022 Daylight Research Award. Photo: The Daylight Award

The second award for this year's Daylight Prize, the Daylight Research Prize, went to Swiss biologist Anna Wirz-Justice. She began studying the biological relationship between sunlight and human sleep in the 1990s. For more than 30 years, she has continued to track and cure patients with various levels of emotional disorders, sleep disorders, borderline personality disorder and other mental symptoms, and is committed to treatment through light therapy.
In her paper "The Role of Daylight on Humans: Gaps in Current Knowledge" published in February 2020, she elaborated on how the human body clock is coordinated with natural daylight, and how the body's circadian rhythm is formed and works, emphasizing daylight The importance and healing properties of sunlight, published a series of important research results on the impact of different amounts and qualities of sunlight on human emotional health, and encouraged people to reduce the working environment of electric lights as much as possible and have direct contact with sunlight. In October of the same year, she published "The Significance of Sunlight to Humans", further emphasizing the relationship of sunlight to human emotions, stress, sleep, and the degree of demand for sunlight by various tissues of the body, introducing the role of light therapy, and suggesting Undesirable factors such as long-term exposure to ultraviolet radiation in natural sunlight are eliminated.

Anna Wirz-Justiceat the 2014 Venice Biennale. Photo: The Daylight Award

Anna Wirz-Justice's selfie at Art Basel. Photo: The Daylight Award

Article / Wang Zi

Pictures / The Daylight Award, 2022

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