The lecture series The Ordinary Daylight aims to draw attention to the quality of daylight – rather than the amount of light required by building codes and regulations that sometimes can overwhelmingly hijack conversations about natural daylight in contemporary buildings today. The lecture series does this through focusing on architects who work consciously and qualitatively with the effects of daylight in architecture. Each lecture being an opportunity to share work and ideas, providing an insight into approach and methodology while collectively providing an outline of various ways to explore and engage with daylight.
On Wednesday, November 20th Dean Hawkes will do a lecture in the series. The lecture is called “Reflections on Light”, and Dean Hawkes is emeritus professor of architectural design at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University and an emeritus fellow of Darwin College, University of Cambridge His research is in the field of environmental design in architecture. His books include, The Environmental Tradition (1996), The Environmental Imagination (2008, 2nd edition 2019) and Architecture and Climate (2012). His buildings have won four RIBA Architecture Awards and have been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale.
Dean Hawkes describes his lectures like this:
“I only wish that the first really worthwhile discovery of science would be that it recognised that the unmeasureable is what they’re really fighting to understand, and that the measureable is only the servant of the unmeasureable, that everything that man makes must be fundamentally unmeasureable.
Louis I. Kahn
Light in architecture is a matter of both science and art. The key question, as posed by Louis Kahn, is how these two discourses may be brought together. This lecture draws upon fifty years of work in research and practice to suggest how the measureable of building science serves the unmeasureable of architecture. This is illustrated by studies of a sequence of designs for houses built in England in the late 20th century.”
Previous lecturers in the series include among others Stephen Bates, co-founder of Sergison Bates architects (UK); Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen, founding partners of Pezo von Ellrichshausen (CHL); Johan Celsing; founding partner of Celsing architecture studio (SWE) and Hiroshi Sambuichi (JPN).
The lectures are a collaboration between the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture and Aarhus School of Architecture and kindly supported by VELUX Denmark. Lectures will be held at both schools and will be open to the public, so students, faculty, practice, as well as other interested parties, will be able to take advantage of the knowledge and experiences presented.
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