How tackling emissions can help us breathe easy
By Tom Howells
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VELUX at Global Design Forum: 'The Healthy City'
For eight decades, the Danish skylight brand VELUX has helped illuminate the spaces in which we live – a legacy that began in during the second world war, when Villum Kann Rasmussen invented the first iteration of a roof window that transform dowdy attics into newfangled domestic spaces.
Now, the company is an industry leader in both its signature products and in its commitment to sustainability, from the robust construction of the skylights in certified woods, to battling emission outputs by switching to renewable energy and financing WWF forest projects that will sequester a carbon output consummate with the company’s entire historical emissions by 2041.
It’s an ethos echoed, loudly, in VELUX’s day of talks at this year’s Global Design Forum. Under the banner of ‘The Healthy City’, it seeks to raise questions (and workable answers) around tackling urban air pollution and building emissions through design, constructing homes with reduced environmental impact, remedying climate-induced sleep inequality and building green cities – encouraging agronomists, architects and designers to collaborate around the challenges of urban biodiversity and population wellbeing.
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Crucially, it’s not all bluster. Last year, VELUX launched its Living Places initiative in Copenhagen, fully substantiating its green credentials in the form of ‘an experimental living environment’. It demonstrated that sustainable building can happen now – without new technology. Living Places showed that the brand could create, at market price, a prototype house (in fact, seven in all) with a CO₂ footprint three times lower than that of the average single-family home in Denmark – a huge boon when the industry accounts for a gargantuan 34% of the globe’s energy consumption and produces 37% of CO₂ emissions.
"Our partnership with this year’s London Design Festival reflects our commitment to leading the way on sustainable business practices within our sector,” says Richard Williams, senior architect development manager at VELUX. “Sustainability and green design are at the heart of both VELUX and the LDF, which is why hosting this day as one brings two allies together to inspire others within the sector.”
How’s that for a breath of fresh air?
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