Press Release: Ólafur Eliasson wins Green Good Design Award for 2015 Tell a friend

DUBLIN, IRELAND….EARTH DAY, APRIL 22, 2015....Ólafur Elíasson, the Icelandic artist known for sculptures and large-scale installation art employing elemental materials such as light, water, and air temperature to enhance the viewer’s experience, together with the German engineer, Frederik Ottesen, have won a 2015 Green GOOD DESIGN Award for the creation of their not-for-profit, Berlin-based organization called "Little Sun," which distributes a high-quality, solar-powered LED lamp to Third World Countries.

The Green GOOD DESIGN Awards are organized jointly by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies based in Dublin, Ireland. 

GOOD DESIGN was founded in Chicago in 1950 by architects Eero Saarinen and Charles and Ray Eames and remains as the world's most recognized and prestigious prize that annually honors thousands of designers, architects, and manufactures globally for their advancement of visionary innovation and design excellence. 

Since 1950, the GOOD DESIGN Award has been bestowed to over 40,000 new products and graphics from a paper clip to a NASA space ship.

In 2007, The Chicago Athenaeum added a special "Green Edition" to the annualGOOD DESIGN awards program to highlight and promote new products, buildings, and urban planning projects that emphasize sustainability, environmental concerns, ecology, energy conservation, and recycling as part of the Museum's public education mission.

"Little Sun," states Christian Narkiewicz-Laine, Museum President of The Chicago Athenaeum, is a human-based social business enterprise and global project addressing the need for light in a sustainable way that benefits communities without electricity, while creating local jobs that generate local profits within its communities, mostly in the Third World."

"Little Sun is truly a visionary scheme of heroic proportions befitting of Chicago architect Daniel Burnham's 'Make no Little Plans' that has huge repercussions to the world's environment in a beautifully subtle, understated way. Our Museum applauds the Eliasson and Ottesen team for their profound contribution to humanitarian and ecological concerns that forward global peace, human rights, and global stability. This global project connects the world through the sharing of light."

The organizational mission of Little Sun is provide clean, solar-powered light to as many people in the world by focusing its reach particularly in off-grid areas, which need light the most. The project strengthens off-grid communities from the inside out, training young local entrepreneurs to become Little Sun sales agents and powering their small businesses with an initial seed capital of Little Sun lamps, which allows them to get their start.