All submitted projects were evaluated by an international jury comprising:
Hani Rashid (USA), architect and principal in Asymptote Architecture in New York City. Elected chairman of the jury.
Enrique Browne (Chile), architect and principal in Enrique Browne & Associates with offices in Chile.
Huat Lim (Malaysia), architect and principal in ZLG Design with headquarters in Kuala Lumpur.
Eva Jiricna (UK), architect and principal in Eva Jiricna Architects with offices in London and Praque. Appointed to the jury by the International Union of Architects (UIA)
Francis Nordemann (France), architect, urban planner and professor at the Paris School of Architecture, Belleville. Appointed to the jury by the European Association of Architectural Education (EAAE).
Michel Langrand (France) is the jury representative for VELUX. Mr. Langrand is President of VELUX France.
The jury meeting
The jury met in Turin, Italy, from 25 to 26 June 2008. Hani Rashid was elected chairman and presided over the jury’s work. The jury agreed on three prize winners and eight honourable mentions.
Jury impressions
The jury noted that the total number of 686 projects from 244 schools in 46 countries represent an incredible variation in responses to the theme “Light of Tomorrow”. With entries from all over the world, the Award literally represents the zeitgeist of architectural education and evidently it also proves the global penetration and interaction between students and schools from any continent.
Hani Rashid:
- I was very surprised at the amount of work, an incredible outpouring of ideas and extensive ideas, very bright. I was also very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the work, there was some very strong work and to see students from all over the world attack this problem and represent their ideas of light of the future is inspiring.
Enrique Browne:
- I think they are good, they are really good. Because they ask new questions, perhaps they have to know the answer and in many cases they even know it. The use of light in the city and in big spaces like in the underground is a good point.
Huat Lim:
- The light of tomorrow is a very relevant issue for what is the connection between daylight and sustainability and energy. Apparently there is a link between the three. Are we more aware of energy, can we be more sustainable.
Francis Nordemann:
- We were looking for another way of considering light. Most of the products in this competition bring light where light is usually not, like in the underground. That’s not a new way to deal with it, but it’s a way to push forward limits to where darkness is.
Eva Jiricna:
- I think the quality was generally speaking very high. When you do competitions like this you have a much larger variety of methods used by students expressing themselves and it is about light in different schools of Architecture, so each country had a different way of proposing projects.
Michel Langrand:
- The light of tomorrow is by comparison with the light of today which is well mastered by present architects and by present industries and companies. A few years ago we would probably have had a big splash of electricity to bring the light of tomorrow. Today we can see there is a much bigger concern about ecological and environmental renewable energy.
You can download the jury report and interviews with the jury members at www.velux.com/iva in the press section.