Marilyne Andersen
The Daylight Award 2016 laureate for daylight research
BIOGRAPHY
Marilyne Andersen, Professor of Sustainable Construction Technologies at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) and Co-Founder of OCULIGHT dynamics Sàrl. Andersen is a Full Professor of Sustainable Construction Technologies and Dean of the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering of EPFL (ENAC). She is heading the Laboratory of Integrated Performance in Design (LIPID) that she launched in the Fall of 2010. Before joining EPFL as a faculty, she was an Assistant Professor then Associate Professor tenure-track in the Building Technology Group of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning and the Head of the MIT Daylighting Lab that she founded in 2004. Andersen's research lies at the interface between science, engineering and architectural design with a dedicated emphasis on the impact of daylight on building occupants. Focused on questions of comfort, perception and health and their implications on energy considerations, these research efforts aim towards a deeper integration of the design process with daylighting performance and indoor comfort, by reaching out to various fields of science, from chronobiology and neuroscience to psychophysics and computer graphics. She is leveraging this research in practice through OCULIGHT dynamics, a startup company she co-founded, which offers specialized consulting services on daylight performance and its psycho-physiological effects on building occupants. Laureate of The Daylight Award 2016 for Daylight Research and member of the Jury from 2018 to 2022.
Lars Courage, Architect and Creative Director of Courage Architecten, and president of `Dutch Daylight´ from 2015 to 2023. Courage was unconsciously influenced by from an early age by the power of daylight and view to the outside. Throughout his development as an architect, the influence and especially the application of daylight-driven design has developed from unconsciously competent to consciously competent and in 2012 his office was the winner of the Dutch Daylight Award. The office´s designs are composed with open light support structures, large glass surfaces where comfort and energy-consciousness go hand in hand; from single family homes, collective housing, municipality center to car sales facilities. Since 2004, `Dutch Daylight´ has been actively committed to placing daylighting in the central place it deserved in architecture and the built environment. `Dutch Daylight´ not only wants to point out the high potential of daylight to architects, designers and urban planners, but also to make clients, policy makers and other parties involved aware of the importance of good quality use of daylight.
Per Arnold Andersen, Architect MAA and Director of The Daylight Award. On behalf of the VELUX Foundations he has managed the award, that honors architects and researchers for their achievements, since 2015. He worked for more than twenty years as an architect and project manager in major Danish architect offices until he joined the VELUX Group from 1999 to 2021. Since 2003, he was the driver of the VELUX Group’s daylight strategies and initiatives and he has been a driving force in the making of the first European standard for daylight in buildings. Andersen worked continuously with the International VELUX Award for Students of Architecture since its start in 2004. Today, the award is the biggest international award for students working with daylight in their projects. In 2005, he initiated the VELUX Daylight Symposium, which is an established international venue for sharing knowledge and ideas across disciplines within architecture and daylight research and from 2008 to 2018 he was editorial team member of “Daylight and Architecture”, the D/A Magazine for architects. Today, Per Arnold Andersen serves as special advisor to the VELUX Group and to the VELUX Foundations.
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