Per Olaf Fjeld

He took his master degree under Louis I Kahn at the University of Pennsylvania. He later returned to the University of Pennsylvania to do research under a Fulbright-Hays grant. Today Per Olaf Fjeld is a professor at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Fjeld has written a number of books and articles on architecture. His first international work was "Sverre Fehn, The Thought of Construction" Rizzoli, 1983. He has taught and served on juries throughout Europe, and has been a guest professor at Cornell University and the University of Arizona. In 2004 he was elected vice president of the European Association of Architectural Education (EAAE). Since 1975 Fjeld has run a small architectural studio with his wife, Emily Randall Fjeld.

Question. With almost 600 projects coming from different backgrounds, is the theme of light able to bring them together?
Answer. The strength of the award is that there are participants from all over the world, and light itself has a map, it exists everywhere, but the architectural conditions related to light are also different from place to place, and one can very much see that within the variety of the projects this has to some extent been taken into consideration, but at the same time one can also see that the discussion of light related to the openness of the award itself is bringing out discussions and solutions that reflect on not only the possibility of light and the way it has been used before, but also the further capacity of the students to discuss one of the most important materials of architecture.

Q. You have acted as chairman of the jury, how was this decided and what was the process chosen to review all the projects?
A. I was chosen by the jury panel to act as chairman, this was not discussed before so it’s not such a big issue, but since I was responsible for the jury I had a certain way of doing it. I think it is very important that everybody sees the projects the first time individually. But when that is done, it is very important to have a jury discussion with each of the projects selected, and also to go back and forth and never stop the discussion before it's finished.
Then gradually the team matures, in its own discussion, and in the end one is quite sure about which projects should be chosen as winners and honourable mentions. This is how the jury worked, and it was not that difficult to come up with the result, and in the end it was a unanimous decision.

Q. VELUX suggested certain guidelines: natural and artificial light, inside and out, urban living context... Did you see these or other especially interesting new themes reflected in the projects?
A. No, I wouldn't say that there were any new themes particularly coming up, I think it is interesting that one can start to see a division of projects that have architecture per se implicit in them, but at the same time discuss a quite complex idea of light without too much technology going on, and then other projects that are very focussed on technological architecture within light.

Q. To what extent are the proposals selected based on the relationship between material innovation and light?
A. It is the development of the technological aspect of the material itself more than the spaces that are supposed to be followed by that material or inspired towards another space. In this sense I think we still have a long way to go. In other words, the technological aspect is in some way also used within the idea of the old space, so the maturity within these new materials and their capacity to bring forward another type of spatial quality, beyond the window, is still, I think, an open discussion.

Q. When we talk about other sources of energy the message is a bit more pessimistic, “Light of Tomorrow” is an optimistic motto. Is this the way that light will always be presented, or contemplated in architecture and in this award?
A. Related to light I can only see optimism because it is a free material and it is there to be used. In the relationship between the body of mass and the body of light there will always be a spatial attitude, a spatial possibility. The question is in what way we will drive that possibility and each one of these 500 and something projects discusses that in a certain way.