This website uses cookies

Royal Danish Academy – Architecture, Design, Conservation uses cookies to create a better user experience, to interact with social platforms and for anonymised statistics of traffic on our website.

Social media cookies enable us to interact with well-known social media platforms and content. This may be for statistical or marketing reasons.
Neccesary to display YouTube videos
Neccesary to display Vimeo videos
Preference cookies enable a website to remember information that changes the way the website behaves or looks, like your preferred language or the region that you are in.
Is used for UI states

Master’s Graduation Project 2015: The Path of Light through a Shell

Date
22.07.2015
Category
Cooperation and business

Humans are dependent upon light in most of life’s situations, which is why light and architecture are inextricably linked. Architect Hulda Jonsdottir has studied the behaviour of light within shell structures and has developed a new way of getting the two to work beautifully together.

Reception, CultureShipyard

What is your Master’s graduation project about?
For my final Master’s project, Beyond Structure, I studied how daylight behaves and is spread within an architectural shell construction. I focused on how to manage and modulate daylight through digitally designed and shaped physical patterns in the shell structure, and I developed a design method that combines light and shell structure in a different way than has been done previously.

It is a matter of getting the shell structure and light to act as one, with light and texture working equally together. This is in contrast to the typical approach where shell construction is viewed as being the optimum physical structure, but does not work together with light, space or aesthetics as integral entities.

For me, light is ‘beyond structure’.

Why did you choose to work with others on your project?
During the course of my project, I worked with Daniel Lee (structural engineer and associate professor), and Emanuele Naboni, (associate professor of lighting and sustainable design), both teachers at KADK. This afforded me the opportunity to work across disciplines, thereby giving me the chance to explore my project from different angles.

For me, inter-disciplinary co-operation is very important in architecture, and this played a key role in the digital working method of my project.

What is most fun and what things are hardest when working on architecture in the way that you do?
The thing that is most fun and the thing that is the hardest are two sides of the same coin. When you work on architecture in the way that I do (with parametric interpretation, examination of materials and digital manufacturing, i.e. 3D printing, laser cutting, programming of a robot arm etc.), it leads to new ways of experiencing and thinking about architecture. It gives you the opportunity to question how things have been done before and how things are done now, and to find new and innovative ways of pinpointing just what it is that has aroused your curiosity.

What do you consider to be your greatest strength as a KADK architecture graduate?
My greatest strength is my ability to ask questions and solve problems through research and through innovative ways of thinking of and looking at architecture. Designing through research and manufacturing has changed the way I think about architecture. Other strengths are my skills in using digital tools in the design process, my positive attitude to learning new things and a desire to continue learning.

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
In five years, I hope that I will be helping to spread awareness of digital manufacturing and innovative design through my work – also between different industries.

Because my education has been split between the Institute of Advanced Architecture in Barcelona and KADK, I have gained a global network of colleagues, who all work in the same way as I do. I am looking forward to embarking upon my journey as an architect with an open mind, and I am open to all options that come my way.