Welcome to the NAF/NAAR Symposium 2025:

"Light and Colour in Architecture"

Light and colour are powerful means in creating architecture, landscapes, and urban environments, yet within the broader field, they sometimes struggle to gain prominence and may even be underresearched. Over the past few decades, both light and colour have been increasingly viewed as providing possibilities as well as challenges—with respect to social and cultural as well as and ecological questions—within research, practice, and popular discourse alike. This has direct and indirect effects on how environments are designed and built. Whilst both fields have seen significant advances, they have also been confronted with increasing sustainability demands in connection with a range of aspects such as raw materials pollution, health and well-being concerns, multi-species considerations, and energy use. Against this backdrop, the annual symposium of the Nordic Association for Architectural Research (NAAR) is dedicated to topics relating to light and colour in the wider field of architecture. Light and colour are fundamental to the experience and creation of architecture and urban planning. They are inseparable in human visual perception and together they create the visual experience of the environment; and whether consciously or not, architecture, landscapes, and urban design deal with light and colour by giving shape, form, and materiality to our lived environment. Of growing importance and relevance for the field, too, is how they support and affect not only human life, but other species as well as natural processes.1 Understanding light, colour, and their interaction is thus fundamental for the professions responsible for forming, creating, and organizing them.

This understanding includes many aspects: environmental, social, cultural, aesthetic, psychological, perceptual, ecological, and many others. Colour, light, and material interact to create or communicate visual and tactile experiences, which also affect everything, from observable animals and insects to vegetation and microbes, in multifaceted, complex, and differentiated ways. They affect the atmosphere that is experienced, the expression of universal or/and local-cultural meanings, visual comfort and ergonomics, and wayfinding, and have both direct and indirect non-visual effects such as influencing alertness and the regulation of circadian rhythms as well as the emergence of heat island effects. Through its treatment of light and colour, architecture impacts living beings through reflecting, absorbing, and diffusing light, as well as creating the colour environments that these beings navigate and that may affect them directly or indirectly.

Keynote Speakers