Velux Award 2014

At the Award event of the International VELUX Award 2014, a team of four students from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, takes first prize with their project “Light, Revitalization”, a beautiful and profound exploration of the role of daylight in modern urban life.

Taking their starting point in the city of Beijing, a testing ground of new architecture, the winning team from the Tsinghua University decided to search for the valuable things that should be preserved from the past and reconnected to modern life.

The jury praises the project for its maturity and for presenting something entirely plausible and feasible, tying together old Chinese traditions and new ways of looking at these traditions. The scheme demonstrates a deep understanding of the role of daylight in a city scale, in a social scale and in a cultural scale.

The jury characterizes the second prize as fantastic, tying aspects of science fiction with the real world in a very mature approach, animating a demilitarized zone as an artificial cloud. The project “Morning Glory Cloud” is created by two students from Hanyang University and Hongik University in Seoul, Korea, as an inspiration to think about the possibility of the invisible Korean boundary’s disappearance. The third prize winning project “Light of Hope” aims to bring glows of hope and lighting to the millions of people living in refugee camps around the world. The jury found the project both cost effective, practically feasible and with a human quality expressing the sincere social engagement of the team of four students from the University of Architecture, Construction and Geodesy, Sofia, Bulgaria. In addition to the prize winners, the jury awards two special mentions, both from China, and seven honourable mentions representing Canada, Italy, Denmark, Bulgaria and China. All prize winners and honourable mentions have been decided unanimously by the jury.