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Mankind and Architectural lighting
No other material fires the imagination of architects quite as much as glass. Michael Wigginton describes the history of a material used for architectural lighting, whose architectural potential is a long way from being exhausted.
Over about the last 3500 years, glass has gone from being a luxury product to a universal one. People have always been fascinated by it. Michael Wigginton, Professor of Architecture and Design at the University of Plymouth refers to the first glass pearls, which originated from Egypt and Mesopotamia, used in the Roman art of glass blowing and the discovery of the material for architectural use. Wigginton makes a distinction between five “glass ages”: the Gothic Age, the time of the large conservatories in the 19th Century, the Early Modern Age, the “High-Tech” buildings of the 1980s and 1990s and the present trend for multi-purpose, intelligent building wrappers made of glass. Technology and aesthetics can never be mutually exclusive.
Michael Wigginton: “The potential richness of the multi functional intelligent skin, responding moment by moment, and season by season to the vagaries of climate and the needs of the occupants has the potential to give us the transient beauty of the butterfly's wing.”
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Welcome to Daylight & Architecture Magazine by VELUX
The focus on daylight in architecture is high and rising. In this respect, VELUX wants to play a role by contributing and stimulating issues that lead to better living environments. As an international manufacturer of roof windows and skylight systems, it is important for us constantly to seek and strengthen the relevance of our products in architecture. We would like to enhance and encourage the role of daylight in design prioritising.This focus is our platform for building and nurturing relations with the building sector – not least with architects.
Our founder, Villum Kann Rasmussen invented the roof window in 1942. He called his company by the short name of VELUX, an acronym of VEntilation and the Latin word for light, LUX. Part of Villum Kann Rasmussen’s original vision was to create good cheap square metres of living space under pitched roofs by letting light into the attic at a time when living space was in shortage. In the early years of VELUX much time was spent with architects and other trendsetters to present the concept and the products. By doing this, he laid the cornerstone of the strategy that we pursue today: to engage in have dedicated dialogue with professionals about daylight, and to seek and strengthen the architectural relevance of our products. We see our daily business as being closely linked to building design, with the overall objective of focussing on daylight and fresh air as providers of better living conditions in people’s everyday lives.
This objective is the platform from which we present “Daylight & Architecture”. In this magazine – and in the issues to come – we will strive to raise topics and present views and angles about the past, present and future of architecture with daylight and fresh air. This will provide a platform for dialogue between professionals in which we will raise questions rather than give standard answers and statements and thereby inspire and facilitate the discourse on architecture, especially daylight.
Enjoy the read
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