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The 2010 International Velux Awards invite students from all over the world to “celebrate talent, determination and courage among the students of architecture”. This biennial competition, which offers three main prizes (one 1st and two 2nd place prizes), and eight honorable mentions, as well as prize money totaling 30,000 euros, aims promote excellence in completed studies in any scale, from small-scale components to large urban contexts or abstract concepts and experimentation.

This year’s competition – which is open to all students of architecture – had 673 entries from 280 schools around the world, including TU Delft, which was among the event’s biggest winners: of 11 winning teams, TU Delft was the only institution to claim three winners, while having only eight teams registered.

The competition’s theme was ‘Light of Tomorrow’, which challenged students to create projects that explored the theme of daylight in its widest sense, creating deeper understandings of this specific, ever-relevant source of energy and light.

Students were set the task of taking an open-minded, experimental approach to exploring the future of daylight in the built environment and widening the boundaries of daylight in architecture, including aesthetics, functionality, sustainability, and interactions between buildings and the environment.
TU Delft’s Velux Award winners included Joe Wu, who claimed the overall 2nd prize, and honorable mention winners, Shi Yan and Chung-Kai Yang. Also claiming an honorable mention award was Berte Daan, a Dutch, TU Delft architecture graduate currently pursuing her studies at EHT Zurich.
Wu, from Hong Kong, graduated from Tunghai University in 2005 and is now pursuing an MSc degree at TU Delft. For laymen, daylight, a simple everyday fact of life, may seem an odd concept to build a competition around, but daylight has long been a key element in design.

“Physically, light is the very basic element of the universe, with all earthly operations dependant on the natural light provided by the sun,” Wu says. “Moreover, poetically, light appears in all our human activities, in literature, art, in all human creation throughout history, and light also influences emotional experiences.”

For his project Wu turned to memories of his childhood, of living in a block apartment building in Hong Kong, one of Asia’s most high density built environments, characterized by its extreme vertical urban development. As the jury noted in describing Wu’s project, “the author was living in an apartment building in his childhood. The window was seldom opened and it was blocked by a neighboring wall, but the effects of diagonal sunlight reflections created the most beautiful paintings in time.”

“Ours was the typical urban block, window with no view as opening interface communicating internally or externally,” Wu explains. “Window with no view and facing is not rare in Hong Kong. How to let natural sunlight get into the living space in this special urban situation was my project’s basic question.”
Wu’s strategy was to create a reflecting system to reflect sunlight to the dark side of the building, by calculating the movement of sunlight, distances between gaps, orientations of every wall and window, and window sizes.
“The complexity of every factor makes every piece of reflecting element different,” he says. “All calculations can be programmed by computer, so digital fabrication is an important part of my project.”

The jury moreover was not only impressed with Wu’s project but also saw its potential for real world application: “The project works with a solution that could be universally applied to major cities all over the world – in dense urban spaces on the dark side of buildings that never receive light.”

Beauty
Claiming one of the eight honorable mentions for TU Delft was the team of Shi Yan, from Chengdu, China, and a recent graduate of the TU’s faculty of Architecture, and Chung-Kai Yang, from Taiwan, who is currently pursuing his PhD at TU Delft’s faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Sciences’ department of microelectronics.

Yan and Yang’s project, titled ‘Beauty in the UnDaylightable’, aimed to combine aesthetic design and engineering in a unified expression, centering on collecting sunlight in fields and distributing via optical fibers to neighboring towns/cities.

“Daylight’s a usual, common factor to be considered in architectural designs,” Yan says, “but because it is common, its beauty and interpretation are often neglected. People see daylight as a building element, but forget to appreciate and be playful with it.”

Yang further elaborated on their winning project from an engineering point-of-view: “The ‘light of tomorrow’ has the meaning of efficiently controlling, converting and using energy. While converting solar power has gained in popularity these days, controlling and directing sunlight with optical fibers in architecture and urbanism has been less discussed”

The 2010 Velux Awards ceremony was held in La Rochelle and also included an additional two-day workshop for the winners, who were each asked to produce a 4-minute long film based around the theme of ‘The light of La Rochelle’, which were then shown during the award ceremony. The 23 winners were grouped into eleven teams and each given a digital camcorder to capture the ‘space’, ‘changeability’ and ‘materiality’ of light in La Rochelle. The short films can be viewed on the Velux Award website.

Yan and Yang’s film aimed to show viewers how to discover infinitive ways of observing and understanding light on ordinary days and in common places, playing on the interactions between light, shadow, space and facades. “Every scene we shot could be found in corners of the city,” Yan said, when introducing their film during the award ceremony. “Every light we caught belonged to two simple and common days of a year. It happens right here, beside us in our daily life.”

And so it was left to the mayor of La Rochelle, Mr Maxime Bono, to express his appreciation for the students’ unique renderings of his city on film: “I saw the light of La Rochelle. The light that is always changing reflected on the walls, so that even though you are in the city you feel as if you are by the sea.”  

iva.velux.com

Camiel Eurlings introduceerde als minister van Infrastructuur en Milieu in september 2008 ‘Uitgestudeerd’: in de hoop hbo- en wo-studenten als ov-klanten te behouden konden ze bij inlevering van hun ov-kaart gratis een voordeelurenkaart en twee dagen vrij reizen krijgen.

Navraag van het digitale universiteitsblad DUB bij de NS leert dat in 2010 maar een kleine dertigduizend afgestudeerden en studiestakers gebruik maakten van het aanbod. De NS kan niet over de adressen van voormalige studenten beschikken en overweegt een algemene campagne om hun op het voordeel te wijzen.

Overigens wordt de voordeelurenkaart-oude-stijl waarschijnlijk omgezet in een ‘dal-voordeelkaart’. De korting geldt dan ook niet meer in de avondspits tussen 16.00 en 18.30 uur.