The Daylight Award 2022 (The Daylight Award) is a webcast format, the award ceremony except for the winners and guests, and a small audience, only the projection screen and soft sunlight, this atmosphere makes the award ceremony is more like a symposium, around the theme: warmth.

The Daylight Award is an award sponsored by the building materials manufacturer VELUX Foundation, biennial, the award is set up as the Architectural Daylight Award and Daylight Research Award two. The former is awarded to an architect or architectural firm that has made flexible use of daylight in architecture, while the latter is awarded to a scholar outside the field of architecture who has conducted in-depth research on daylight itself.

This year's winners of the Daylight Prize for Architecture are Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, founders of Grafton Architects in Ireland, and winners of the 2020 Pritzker Prize for Architecture.

Their design perspective is more like that of a mother than that of a fully rational architect. People are wrapped in the warmth of their mother's body before they are born, and when they grow up, they are wrapped in architecture. They want people to feel warm in buildings, and sunlight plays a vital role in that relationship, and architects should address it and apply it to their designs, rather than letting people live in electric light or dark, cold environments.

In a benchmark case such as the Kingston University Learning Center in London, their ideas are on full display. The whole building area is about 9400 square meters, which contains the library and archives, various professional studios, theater and study space, café, creative center, etc. It is a typical European cultural and educational complex building. The service targets are not only for our students, but also for alumni and community members to provide various cultural and educational services.

In this building, four light halls run through the core functional areas in four directions, allowing the presence of natural light to be felt in any place. On the outside of the façade adjacent to the entrance, a matrix of high headroom frames are set up. The form, density, and height of these frames are simulated and adjusted several times during the design to create a bright space that is the opposite of the gray space commonly used in architecture to distinguish the interior from the exterior, and to provide a more innovative transition treatment for the entrances and exits on each floor, so that students can feel the warmth and safety of being wrapped in sunlight and architecture while studying here.

Grafton Architects designed a self-consistent logic of expression for this building, in which the functions, spaces, and facades gradually change from simple to complex, from ground to top floor. This progressive logic not only traces the form of several classic European architectural languages and proportional conventions, such as the ancient Greek colonnade, the cathedral wall of Maggiore in Italy, the interior language of Trinity College in Ireland, and the Palais Royal in France, but also breaks the shielding from sunlight in these classic examples, using more finely-tuned patios and side permeable structures, as well as floor-to-ceiling curtain walls that change with the structure.

This logic of changing floor by floor and bringing in daylight is also applied in the Marshall Building of the London School of Economics, which will be completed in 2022. The 18,000-square-meter building's constrained surroundings would have destroyed the relationship between the building and its surroundings if it had been built with a high-rise core, and the complex spaces of the gymnasium, lecture halls, classrooms, research laboratories, laboratories, and cultural spaces that must be accommodated within the building made it critical to address the connections between the various functions.

Through the field survey, the architects first simplified the floor-to-ceiling lobby part, including the relationship with the alignment of the neighboring buildings' stratification lines, and set up the twist of the two parts of the main east-west building in the rhythmic change of ascending floor by floor, and the direction of the twist echoes the neighboring buildings. In this way, the twist is also allowed to create a cavity that is used as a passage for sunlight to enter. Then, the architects created a semi-open public space above the street level of the lobby to incorporate sunlight, as a communal communication space and traffic digestion space for all cultural and educational spaces. Finally, breaking the constraints of the traditional column network, they used a diffused structure of bunched columns to minimize the possibility of each floor being occupied by the structure, and these bunched columns look like a large plain concrete tree growing from the ground in the atrium section.

There are not many cultural and educational complexes in China that accommodate both community members and students, and these three examples are very worthy of consideration. By repeatedly emphasizing the intervention of sunlight in their exploration of such buildings, the two female creators of Grafton Architects are also expressing their intention for architects to bring warmth to the people who use the buildings, not to mention that most of their buildings are for people who come to study.

The second award of this year's Daylight Prize for Daylight Research went to Swiss biologist Anna Wirz Justice. She has been studying the biological aspects of the relationship between daylight and human sleep since the 1990s, and for more than 30 years she has been following and treating patients with various degrees of affective and sleep disorders, borderline personality disorder and other psychiatric conditions with the aim of treating them with light therapy.

In her paper "The Role of Daylight in Humans: Gaps in Current Knowledge," published in February 2020, she detailed how the human biological clock coordinates with natural daylight, how the human circadian rhythm is formed and how it works, emphasized the importance of daylight and its healing effects, and published a series of important research findings on the effects of different amounts and qualities of daylight on human emotional health. She encouraged people to reduce the electric light working environment as much as possible and to have direct contact with daylight. In October of the same year, she published "The Meaning of Daylight for Humans," which further emphasized the relationship of daylight to all aspects of human emotions, stress, and sleep, as well as the need for daylight in various body tissues, introducing the role of light therapy and suggesting the adverse effects of natural sunlight, such as prolonged exposure to ultraviolet radiation.

At the award ceremony, the kindly 80-year-old urged everyone to spend half an hour in the morning to be exposed to daylight. This reminds me of the daylight award initiator VELUX founder Rasmussen. the Danish engineer in 80 years ago when the first project, is for a local school to solve a difficult problem, the cold and wet climate in northern Europe, the classroom can hardly enter the daylight, and the traditional wooden windows leak and not open, the frame roof window is so born.

Article Source:艺术与设计

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