Well-being through daylight access celebrated in Winterthur & Zurich
© Lifefair.org/Visual Craft & © SIGAB SFV-ASVP/L.Reutimann
On 29 August 2024, Prof. Marilyne Andersen, head of the LIPID lab, contributed both as a panelist at the Swiss Green Economy Symposium (SGES) in Winterthur and as an invited speaker at the Glas-Termin 2024 event in Zurich. In both events, she brought the perspective of (day)light, and more broadly indoor environmental quality, to the discussion, in particular with respect to our deeply needed connection to the outdoors and the relationship between well-being and sustainability.
Running since 2013, the 12th edition of the Swiss Green Economy Symposium, held in Winterthur’s Stadthaus, articulated itself in 2024 around a common motto: solving conflicts together (“gemeinsam konflikte lösen”). During its plenary program on the last day of the event, a panel was dedicated to the theme of sustainable and healthy building and living (“Bauen und Wohnen: nachhaltig und gesund”). This panel brought together: Bruno Basler, President of the Board of Directors at EBP, Sandro Beccari, Market Director of VELUX Schweiz AG, Dr. Michael Riediker, Director of the Swiss Centre for Occupational and Environmental Health (SCOEH) and Prof. Marilyne Andersen from EPFL. Topics addressed during the debate ranged from the need to reconcile expectations regarding the high healthiness, cost and low carbon footprint of buildings, the state of practice in Switzerland in this regard, and the tension between human well-being and that of other species of the environment as a whole.
The same afternoon, the third edition of the Glass Encounters (“Glas-Termin”) was held at the Quai Zürich Campus of the Zurich Insurance Group. As part of a series of bilingual interventions revolving around glass technology for building façades, Marilyne Andersen’s talk was entitled ‘Daylight as a human need – glass as an interface with it’ (“Tageslicht als menschliches Bedürfnis, Glas als Schnittstelle dazu” / “La lumière du jour comme besoin humain, le verre comme interface avec elle”), in which she went through ongoing research in her lab (LIPID) on the different dimensions of well-being indoors, including comfort, visual perception and neurophysiological effects of light exposure.