The daylight and building component award 2011

Interview with the French architects Lacaton&Vassal that have been awarded the 2011 Daylight and Building Component Award. The annual award, given by the VELUX and VILLUM Foundations  is a recognition of Lacaton & Vassal’s many years of dedication to working with daylight.
Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal  are principals in Lacaton & Vassal, an architecture firm they started together in 1987. Their designs balance aspects of daylight quality, energy consumption and low-budget economy in a humanistic and aesthetically convincing manner.
The practice has transformed a number of social housing developments in France, where one of their guiding principles is that 90 percent of what is required for most projects is already available on site. Demolition of social housing, they maintain, is not an environmentally friendly option regardless of how green the replacement building may be.
Lacaton and Vassal are inspired by buildings with large open spaces: hangars, warehouses, large greenhouses and supermarkets. In these structures they have found new ways to use standard construction systems to transform older buildings. By bringing more light into the buildings, removing as many walls as possible, creating better acoustics and using glass as an extra facade on the building, they have succeeded in transforming both private and large public projects.