Daylight Symposium
Where knowledge meets practice
Daylight is more than what reaches the eye. It has a long-term impact on our circadian rhythms and regulation of the biological clock. Exposure to light will throughout your life influence your sleep, productivity, alertness, and learning abilities.
The proper use of daylight in buildings can help reduce energy use for lighting, cooling, and heating resulting in a lower carbon footprint–and can also be harvested as a renewable source of energy.
Daylight Symposium is a biennial conference presented by Velux, bringing together a unique community of architects, researchers, and other building professionals to accelerate and promote the exchange of knowledge on the potential of daylight for creating healthy and resilient buildings.
Each year is different, but the shared goal for our community is to bring new ideas, to make a positive change in people’s lives.
“The type of integration that happens with this type of community can promote new knowledge exchange and really accelerate the impact of all of our work” - Kevin Van Den Wymelenberg”
Daylight Symposium has been invaluable for bringing people together and in the past 10 or 12 years over the course of all these events we have gotten to know each other across the world, we have met new colleagues, sparked interesting conversations, our community has expanded, graduates and students have become more excited and more research is happening.” - Lisa Heschong
Designers and researchers, join our community to explore the importance of daylight in architecture for the good of people and our planet.
Symposium themes overview
Daylight Symposium always seeks and builds relevant themes to address challenges and opportunities in the building industry.
Our first symposium took place in 2005. We saw an increased need for a common language among practitioners and researchers, as well as better professional tools and methods to plan, design, and evaluate daylight quality in buildings.
It’s our ongoing focus to see the benefits of daylight in connection with energy use in buildings and human health to meet future challenges in relation to energy efficiency.
We are growing a movement towards sustainable buildings.
Each year, we ask ourselves how we can exploit the untapped potential of buildings by using daylight to transform our homes, workplaces, and public spaces into healthier and more sustainably built environments? Since we spend 90% of our life indoors.
We strive to enable climate-friendly architecture–from knowledge to practice.
“And finally, I’ll just say the daylight symposium had moments that were incredibly detailed and analytical and then pulling back to inspirational and ephemeral. We had multi scalar right, we went from microbes to metropolis, we spended the globe from the arctics to the equator, from the asias to the Americas. We had poetry, we had parametrics... and you know what I think I’ve learned, though I felt maybe I had this as a foundation, now I feel even a better understanding of how daylight is universal, and that the wild variable dynamic messy beautiful light is part of why I came to architecture in the first place...” - Kevin Van Den Wymelenberg, 2021
Presentations
All talks are now available to watch or revisit for everyone. We hope to spark interest in becoming a part of the next symposium.
Last years Symposiums
2005
A Common Language