How can we bridge the gap between daylight research and design practice?

How can we bridge the gap between daylight research and design practice?

More than 90 international speakers will answer this and other critical questions during the event Build for Life 2021.

Build for Life is the Digital Conference (15-17 November 2021), conceived and organized by the VELUX Group, in the strong belief of having to actively address the climate-related challenges of the 21st century by working together with the building industry to create healthy, sustainable buildings that improve the well-being of both people and planet.

As a part of its sustainability strategy, VELUX have committed to taking measurable steps toward positive change while focusing on how buildings can help resolve global challenges with sustainable solutions and practical action.

The Build for Life Conference 2021, a pioneering, multi-disciplinary initiative, has been launched in 2021 to help connect people and planet through better building design and is an open invitation to join a global conversation about how buildings can benefit the environment and improve the quality of life for people everywhere.

The Build for Life Conference will feature more than 90 speakers and connect viewers from the global building industry and beyond and will unfold on two simultaneous stages: the Compass stage and the Daylight Symposium stage.

Since 2005, the Daylight Symposium has explored the power of daylight to create healthy and durable buildings, and this year more than 40 leaders in daylight research and practice will do so.

Daylight Symposium, moderated by Kevin Van Den Wymelenberg, professor of architecture at the University of Oregon and director of the Institute for Health in the Built Environment, includes speakers as Till Roenneberg, Jakob Strømann Andersen and Yvonne de Kort.

Till Roenneberg is professor emeritus at the Medical School of the LMU Munich, a former President of the European Society for Rhythms Research (EBRS), and is currently President of the World Federation of Societies for Chronobiology (WFSC). 


Till Roenneberg during the 8th VELUX Daylight Symposium that took place in Paris on 9 October 2019 - Courtesy of VELUX Group

After studying Biology in Munich (LMU) and London (University College), he worked at Harvard University. In his research for the Human Sleep Project, Till investigates the human internal clock and sleep in the real world. During his career, he has initiated and directed several large national and international research networks and received several international research prizes. He is the author of two books, Internal Time (Harvard University Press, 2012) and The Right to Sleep (DTV, 2019), and has published more than 200 papers that have been cited more than 20,000 times.

Till will present learnings from recent studies investigating how we have been impacted by changes in lifestyle and our physical environment while in lockdown during the covid pandemic.

Jakob Strømann-Andersen is a Danish architect, Partner and Head of Henning Larsen’s Sustainability Engineering Department. Jakob holds a MSc and PhD in Architectural Engineering specializing in healthy, sustainable, and circular design. 


Lecture from the 7th VELUX Daylight Symposium that took place in Berlin on 3-4 May 2017 by Jakob Strømann-Andersen - Courtesy of VELUX Group

Jakob’s research revolves around the interaction between engineering, architecture, and modern technology and how integrated design can form the basis of successful sustainable cities and buildings. As director for Innovation and Sustainability at Henning Larsen, Jakob works to develop innovative solutions in the field of sustainable design.

Jakob’s presentation will address the question "Can generative algorithms improve daylight design?" and will show how we can run and explore a multitude of daylight designs, sort through the iterations and identify the best ones, all while providing detailed analysis for each proposal.

Yvonne de Kort is a Full Professor and Chair of Environmental Psychology of Human-Technology Interaction in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e).

With her group, she investigates the effects of lighting conditions on human functioning (e.g., alertness, stress, sleep, and health), specifically targeting light effects for day-active people in real-world conditions. This explicitly includes both visual effects and circadian and acute effects beyond vision, via our biological clock and neural regions related to alertness and mood. The research brings together insights from psychology, chronobiology, and neuroscience and aims to translate fundamental insights in human responses to light to implications for the design of environments, lighting scenarios, and intelligent lighting solutions.

Yvonne will present the LIGHTCAP project, a European Training Network under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions framework. LIGHTCAP aims to provide a strong, innovative and necessary impulse to our insights into the intricate and complex relationships between light, perception, attention and cognition.

Join the Build for Life Conference 2021 and take part in this global exchange of ideas from November 15-17. 
Register for the event: buildforlife.velux.com