Jury session

6 projects were shortlisted by the jury

At its meeting on 31st march 2022 in Lindau, the jury agreed on six nominations. They all provide clever and sometimes unconventional answers to the respective construction task. Above all, however, they demonstrate a wealth of ideas in dealing with daylight and surprise with a spatial effect that the buildings do not allow to guess from the outside.

Architecture thrives on such surprises, on the space for the unexpected. This does not require expensive and technically complex daylight solutions, but above all empathy, intuition and design skills. This is also shown by the shortlisted projects of this year's VELUX Architects Competition.

Which projects are among the award winners, will be announced at the ceremony on the Daylight Symposium in Basel on the 15th June 2022.

Dapples, extension of an existing building

LOCALARCHITECTURE, Lausanne

The densification of our cities is not only a quantitative, but also a qualitative challenge. The roof extension of LOCALARCHITECTURE shows how it can be mastered in Lausanne.

The building was built at the end of the 1960s and originally had a flat roof. With the two-storey, slightly asymmetrical roof structure, the architects created a contemporary reinterpretation of the surrounding mansard roof houses to fit the existing building into its inner-city environment.

Inside the new roof, room for ten new apartments was created. A wooden skeleton carries the roof load onto the existing outer walls to leave plenty of space and light inside for a free floor plan design.

Engelweiss

ansgar staudt architekten, Basel

Surprisingly variable is this residential building, which ansgar staudt architekten have built in the listed center of Rodersdorf southwest of Basel.

Placed in the second row on its property, the house is typologically and formally based on the traditional farm buildings in the village. While normally a barn floor separates the barn from the residential wing, in this case, a recessed access and sanitary area forms a caesura between the living rooms and bedrooms at the two gable ends.

Above all, the two staircases are designed as veritable light joints. The daylight coming in through skylights reaches the ground floor through the open staircase construction.

St. Marien Community Centre

Nehse & Gerstein Architects, Hanover

The centre of Grasdorf, a district of Laatzen near Hanover, has preserved its village structure – free-standing farmsteads and residential buildings characterise the picture.

The new community centre by Nehse & Gerstein Architects follows their style with its red, local brick facades and the reduced overall shape with gable roof.

An appropriate height makes the space flexible for different uses. Wall panels in the area of the ceiling mediate between the outer building cubature and the spatial geometry of the hall, where they depict the silhouette of a gable roof. Roof windows between the wall panes illuminate the room differently depending on the weather and time of day.

Kindergarten Binzmühle

Melk Nigg Architects, Zug

In the middle of the town centre but also in the countryside – this description of the location is not only the dream of every homeowner, but also offered the best conditions for the kindergarten on Lake Zug.

The replacement new building is slightly elevated on the northern edge of a small local recreation area and opens to the southeast, towards the green space and towards the morning sun. Floor-to-ceiling glazing allows views of the outdoors also from the children's perspective. The roof is composed of triangular segments with different shapes and slopes, in which flat roof windows have been installed.

Conical soffits ensure a uniform incidence of light. In addition to the daylight supply, the electrically operated flat roof windows also make a decisive contribution to air circulation in the rooms.

Logistics center with administration Promega

haascookzemmrich STUDIO2050, Stuttgart

A 9000 m2 roof spans the new building in Walldorf near Heidelberg, where the biotechnology company Promega has combined its offices, logistics and production areas.

Wide cantilevered floor ceilings and a part of the building turned from the axis lead visitors to the main entrance and on to the multi-storey market square in the centre of the building. An open three-storey working environment offers space for around 115 employees and future expansions.

Above all this stretches a mighty wooden beam grate, which is a generous glazed shed roof. Modular skylights allow plenty of daylight into the hall and make the change in the times of day noticeable.

Conversion of a three-party house

Schroeer-Heiermann, architect, Cologne

In the west the street, in the north a park and market square and in the south the completely closed fire wall to the neighboring property – that was the situation in which Chris Schroeer-Heiermann found the narrow, three-storey old building in the south of Cologne.

Inside the house were mainly the corridors on the facades, on the other hand, the areas of use have been movedin poor exposed corners. Today, the house presents itself in a completely different state: newly divided into two apartments as well as a commercial unit and with brightly lit rooms in which the light almost always comes up from several sides. Decisive for this are five new skylights and, above all, numerous openings in the interior walls and ceilings, which direct the light deep into the house.

If you have any questions ...

please contact us via email: christina.brunner@velux.com

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