The long-awaited International Green Construction Code (IgCC) has been published. The International Code Council, the organization that produces building codes widely used in the United States, such as the IBC and IECC, produced the IgCC. Development began in 2009 with the American Institute of Architects on board as a sponsor. The International Association of Lighting Designers (IALD) was represented on the drafting committee and testified at all code development hearings. Along with our IALD colleagues, Lam Partners Principals Keith Yancey and I were intimately involved in the development of the electric and daylighting related provisions of the code. For more on green building codes, see my February 2010 article Will Green Building Codes Leave You Seeing Red?.

So now the question is, will the IgCC be widely adopted? One school of thought is that many municipalities are clamoring for a green building standard written in enforceable code language. The other asks why a municipality would add another very complex code to the enforcement responsibilities of their already overstretched inspectional services departments. Me? Well, I’m skeptical that IgCC will take off, especially considering the anti-regulatory tone in our political discourse these days. But don’t listen to me; I was surprised by the wildfire success of LEED.

What does this have to do with daylighting? Well, did you know that the IgCC has a mandatory provision requiring minimum daylighting of buildings? Surprise! We’re not talking about daylight responsive lighting controls to save energy; we’re talking about buildings having to be designed to ensure a minimum amount of daylight into the building. This is not a code requirement we are used to in the US.

So how does it work in IgCC? First, the requirement only applies to these building and space types:

• Office, Higher Education, Labs

• Retail (single-story and larger than 10,000 square-feet)

• Schools

• Manufacturing and Warehouse

• Library reading areas, Transportation waiting areas, Exhibit halls, Athletic areas.

The IgCC says that in one-or-two story buildings, 50% of your floor area has to be daylighted and 25% in buildings three-floors and up. The trick is defining “daylighted”. IgCC does this with two options: a prescriptive method and a performance method. If your project is required to have a daylighted area larger than 25,000 square-feet, you must use the performance method.

Let’s look at the prescriptive method first. It defines your daylighted area based on the height and width of your windows and skylights. Then, assuming you have a sufficient daylighted area, you determine if you have a high enough “effective aperture” (EA). EA is just your window area multiplied by glass transmittance, divided by the daylighted area. The more window area you have and the higher transmission your glass is, the more daylight will enter. The minimum EA is given in a table and is based on the sky type for your location. There is also a nasty looking formula that lets you reduce the required daylighted area based on exterior shading obstructions, such as other buildings.

The performance method requires daylight computer modeling of the project. Simply put, the performance requirement says that you have to show that you will have at least 300lux and not more than 4500lux in the daylighted area. You show this under clear sky on the equinox for the either 9:00AM or 3:00PM.

Easy, right? Truthfully, both the prescriptive and performance requirements are more complicated than I have led you to believe and this will be especially true when applied to complex architecture. In many cases, designing a building to meet these requirements will require a daylighting design expert, and likely one with expertise in daylight computer modeling software. Those of us who deal with the LEED daylighting credit will find these daylighting requirements familiar, but if IgCC takes off we are going to have to pay attention to daylighting from the very beginning of the building design process. It’s one thing to say, “Hey, let’s see if we can get a LEED point.” With IgCC we’ll be saying, “If I don’t site, mass, and fenestrate my building properly, I’ll be in violation of code.”

Photo credit: Stephen M. Lee (1), Glenn Heinmiller/Lam Partners (2), Lam Partners (3)

St. Julia Church

Weston, MA
Dermady Architects
Robert Osten, Jamie Perry/Lam Partners

Photo Credit: © Jamie Perry/Lam Partners

I love attending the Light + Building conference and tradeshow. It’s just that good. Sure, I enjoy travelling to Germany and marveling at the booths (some as big as houses – big houses), but it’s the sheer amount of information that I absorb in such a short period of time that really blows me away. This show draws the world lighting community, so it really helps provide perspective on a global scale, instead of limiting ourselves to what we’re shown in the US. There were a reported 196,000 visitors and 2,300+ manufacturers exhibiting this year! This was my 3rd visit to this trade show in the past 6 years and it hasn’t let me down yet. Here are a few of the highlights of what I took away from the show this year:

LEDs are finally coming into their own.

For the past 5-7 years we’ve seen the gradual evolution of LED products. Some have been excellent, but most were unsatisfactory replacements of traditional products. Even at the last Light + Building I attended 4 years ago, this was much the case (as it still was, in its entirety, at Lightfair in Philadelphia last year). LED products have always had a place for specialty applications like color changing, very small fixtures, and tight optics, but the difference this year is that almost all of the product manufacturers are really embracing LEDs as the new light source. Instead of simply taking existing product housings, designed around fluorescent, halogen, and CMH sources, there is a flood of new, creative products designed specifically around LEDs. This recent revitalization was also the coup de grâce of halogen at the show; halogen is now just a holdover.

LED system efficiency has finally surpassed that of traditional sources.

We’ve been waiting for this and, until now, the linear fluorescent lamp had surpassed the best LEDs in terms of system efficiency when comparing lm/W, at least in practical applications. The LED manufacturers have been getting great results for years, but they have always reported the lab test results, not those of the actual mass-produced products. Now that the higher-output LEDs can be replicated with consistency on a mass scale, fixture manufacturers have started taking them seriously. Waiting for a reliable LED light source has most likely been the reason the fixtures have taken this long to really catch on. Philips exhibited a replacement LED T8 that surpassed fluorescent T8 efficacy; the phase out from fluorescent to LED will be gradual as the fluorescents are replaced en masse, as they burn out. Since the mass-produced LED replacements are just coming out now, we’ll probably still be using linear fluorescent for a few more years, until the price drops and availability increases.

New lamps!

LED AR111 lamps are on the way. Now we mostly see PAR30, PAR38, and MR16 (aside from the A-lamp replacements). The development of the AR111 replacement really rounds out the group and we’ll have great replacement options for existing fixtures. Museums look out!

LED modules are finally here.

We’ve actually been seeing some LED modules for the past few years. Xicato has been leading the way in this market by providing a standard LED module that can be replaced and has a standardized socket that will take the next version. LEDs have an awesome advantage, in that they can be arranged in almost any way, allowing for some creative, seemingly impossible light fixtures. While there will always be demand for the one-off fixtures, the bread and butter replacements needed a more practical solution. So, like a lamp, when an LED module dims or burns out (yes, they actually fail on occasion), it can be easily replaced. Now other LED manufacturers are catching on and providing their own modular LED components.

Enter the OLEDs.

Organic Light Emitting Diodes were the feature of the lamp manufacturers this year. Osram and Philips have done some extensive work evolving this product line and there is some future potential. Their newest model puts out about 40 lm/W and lasts 20,000 hours. So, although it is not competitive yet, the potential is significant. Unless they reach a technological hurdle they can’t jump, OLEDs will likely have a similar evolution process to that of LEDs and become commercially viable in a few years, although it may take a little bit longer than LEDs did. OLEDs are very appealing because they use readily available components (nothing like rare earth phosphors, which are increasing in demand and decreasing in supply). The OLEDs I’ve seen are panel-shaped and, if they stay that way, there will still be a need for point sources like LEDs.

Glare control is back again!

Whether as a replacement for a standard source in an existing fixture or in a newly designed fixture, LEDs tend to create glare. Like other point sources, they pack a lot of light into a very small area, which our eyes are sensitive to, a ‘supernova effect’ if you will (lots of light from a small source). It may seem obvious that every light fixture should have good glare control, but when fixture manufacturers started switching to LEDs, we saw a lot of products that had real glare problems to address. I’m happy to report that the message got through and the better manufacturers are taking the glare control of LEDs seriously. We have some great quality LED fixtures to look forward to in the very near future.

Municipal lighting controls are in!

We’ve known about these systems for a few years, but more and more manufacturers are embracing them, now even more so that LED street and area lighting is replacing their standard source ancestors. These systems simply send signals through the same power lines that energize the fixtures to tell them to dim and turn on or off. The energy savings potential for cities, and even small towns, is incredible and it works on the existing infrastructure. As more systems are upgraded to LED these controls may become commonplace.

Digital controls are here to stay.

The rest of the world is leaps and bounds ahead of the US when it comes to lighting controls. There are a few excellent US based manufacturers that have really embraced DALI or DALI-like control systems, but the majority of the systems here are power line and 0-10V. Europe, on the other hand, has embraced DALI as the standard for architectural dimming and, as a result, everything just works with everything else – a truly universal protocol. The advantages are numerous and the disadvantages are few and far between. I hope to see increased adoption of this protocol (or at least digital systems) in the future so we finally move out of the 1970′s and join the rest of the world.

Improvements in floor lamp lighting systems are impressive.

Designing for retrofit spaces is probably the biggest market share of lighting design in the world. We simply have more existing buildings (that we need to retrofit) than new buildings. Sometimes we have the opportunity to rework the ceiling structure and install new standard lighting systems, but there are many instances in which we cannot control the structure (low ceilings, arched vaults, etc.). The improvements in floor lamp lighting systems are impressive and there is great potential to use these direct/indirect systems to light both existing and new spaces. Where the manufacturers had been constrained to fluorescent lamp variants, the LEDs are again making headway to improve the performance, efficiency, and aesthetics of these fixtures.

Fixtures, fixtures, fixtures….

There are so many new products that I can’t list them all here. The innovation displayed at Light + Building has always amazed me and they really outdid themselves this year, in part because of the new opportunities LEDs present. Half of what I take away from this show is the inspiration. Get ready to see a whole new round of products from your local reps in the coming year.

Photo Credits: Matt Latchford/Lam Partners

In memory of our founder and mentor

William M.C. Lam
1924 – 2012

Photo credit: Kwai Lam (c) 2008

The rate of growth in LEDs these days is perhaps only exceeded by the rate of growth of colored LEDs. Colored light in itself constitutes a new world, insofar as it is used in a wider architectural context. While destinations like Times Square and Las Vegas (and many rock concerts and laser light shows) have used animated and colored lights for decades, this type of lighting is quickly becoming mainstream and is adding dramatically to the total amount of light in our environments, especially when you take media facades into account. Can we expect colored light to become as ubiquitous as white light? Can our visual landscape handle it? I am both skeptical and intrigued by these recent trends. While there are creative minds out there making the most of it, there’s also a “one-liner” feeling that accompanies many applications, born out of the relative ease of using colored lights and creating effects. Given these competing observations, the topic is definitely worth some critical discussion.

First, I’ll tackle my skepticism. Generally speaking, as human beings, we are conditioned to view things in full-spectrum light, as it most closely resembles daylight. Because colored light is deficient in some parts of the spectrum, it can make many things (like skin and plant life) look unnatural. Given this, it’s hard to use colored light for general illumination. I’m also skeptical of broader use of colored light because it’s visually noisy. Perhaps this is due to our comfort with the way things have been lit “traditionally” (i.e. with white light), but another factor could be that motion or animation often accompanies color. Simple color players make it easy to program fixtures to cycle through a series of routines. So the opposition is not necessarily between white light and, say, red or blue light, but between white and ROYGBIV. It’s also just one step closer to a much “noisier” kind of light: media, which, after all, is just a collection of RGB pixels forming an image. My last hesitation stems from the general lack of imagination with which colored light is most often used. Many installations appear to mostly make use of only a small fraction of colors, and almost always seem to be illuminated at a gaudy 100% brightness. Mixing of colors, subtle shading or highlighting all seem to be nonexistent.

On a cheerier note, let’s move on to what intrigues me about colored light. I’ll start with the biggest attraction: it’s new, somewhat awkward, and as I mentioned, garish. I’m not totally sure what to make of it. That’s fodder for investigation. Until now, color hasn’t been a big part of the lighting palette. To keep things totally colorless is perhaps to keep us from a challenge or a fruitful new frontier. I might be overly optimistic, but at least it will be interesting to find out.

Another appealing facet of colored light, and all of its cousins, is the way it can be employed deliberately to alter perception. In one particularly alluring approach, many media design firms (like Urban Screen) have used light to create elaborate 3d animations that are mapped onto facades, using projection. Through the deft skills of the artists and the use of light alone, these animations make the facades appear to move. Sure, this is smoke and mirrors and simple illusionistic tricks, but on the other hand, it begs the question of how much of what we know about the world around us is a factor of light. It asks us to consider how much can we change our environment by changing its lighting.

“Room for One Color”, 1997, Olafur Eliasson, Take your Time, MoMA, 2008

The last reason I’ll give for my interest pertains to all LEDs, not just the color-changing type. The delivery systems of all LEDs are increasingly varied and defy the bounds of traditional vessels. It is now possible to do almost anything, from bending LEDs to sewing them. Delivery materials, like metal mesh, make light spatially maneuverable, unlike it’s ever been before.

While the above gives a sense of some of the pros and cons that surround colored/dynamic lighting, perhaps the most valuable aspects will be seen in the areas outside its current applications. Dynamic, adaptive, and interactive lighting, quite possibly could have important implications for our environments in terms of health, safety, or post-disaster relief. Because of the ability to change and transform perceptions, it may meet demands for locations or situations where conditions change dramatically and often. The flexibility and adaptability of dynamic, colored lighting fits right into a world in which so little is fixed and constant, but if it’s going to be a lasting and worthwhile development, it is important that we find ways to use it deliberately and critically…at least when we aren’t using it just for fun.

Photo credit: Kera Lagios/Lam Partners (1), woosh2007 (2), Vasenka (3), Kera Lagios (4)

Boston College 2121 Commonwealth Avenue Atrium

Boston, MA
ARC/Architectural Resources Cambridge
Glenn Heinmiller, Amber Hepner/Lam Partners

Photo Credit: © Glenn Heinmiller

For half of a century the principles of visual perception and integrated architectural lighting design, pioneered by Bill Lam, have been practiced and preached by Lam Partners and its architecturally trained staff. In 1961 William M.C. Lam founded William Lam Associates (Proprietorship) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As an architecture student at MIT in the 1940′s, Bill learned to question and challenge the advocacy of overall light level standards. Lighting design should be about creating comfortable luminous environments that provide adequate illumination for visual tasks while primarily addressing the ways in which we perceive brightness and experience architecture. Perhaps the quality of light is more important than the quantity of light? These ideas were in contrast with codes and lighting handbooks at the time.

We see in a logarithmic fashion rather than on a linear scale. Above a basic level of brightness, the improvement to our visual ability is not significantly improved by just increasing the amount of light.

Once a certain level of illumination is achieved, enough to perform basic visual tasks, our perception of brightness and the physiology of how our vision works become more critical to the success of a lighted environment than the absolute quantity of foot-candles. Similar to music, more light is not necessarily better but rather the quality of light is important; turning up the volume of mediocre music just becomes noise, it doesn’t become more enjoyable to listen to.

With talented designers and architects working out of Bill Lam’s basement in the 80′s, a culture of lighting design was fostered that focused on the clarity of details and the integration of disciplines as a team; successful lighting design was only possible through collaboration and integration with the architecture and all of the relevant systems. The “big picture” concepts that many architects were attracted to at the time meshed well with the philosophy of brightness perception, way finding, indirect lighting, patterns of light, and an ambient-task approach found in Bill Lam’s book ‘Perception and Lighting as Formgivers for Architecture’.

“At the very heart of the approach to the design of the luminous environment is the belief that as human beings we evaluate an environment according to how well that environment is structured, organized and illuminated to satisfy all of our needs for visual information.” – Bill Lam

In 1990, Paul Zaferiou and Robert Osten, along with Bill Lam, moved the new partnership of Lam Partners Inc to its current location on Sherman Street, only a few minutes from its original roots.

The notion of lighting as an integral part of the architectural design, rather than something applied to the architecture, was not lost in the fit-out of the new office space. Concealing cove fixtures within cleanly detailed soffits, hiding simple lighting hardware behind architectural valances, and integrating task-ambient lighting into the design of the workstation partitions themselves were consistent with the ideals and principles practiced by the firm; lighting is about the experience of the architecture and not the lighting itself. Asking the question, “What do you want to see?” at the start of each project leads to lighting the surfaces and materials that we need and want to see clearly, while minimizing the visual noise and clutter, creating hierarchy and rhythm with light and material, and placing the light where it is needed to accentuate the design.

In 1995, Bill Lam retired from Lam Partners and his vision of lighting design as an integral piece of the architectural design process was carried on by those now directing the firm, those who had learned from and been inspired by watching the team process of design that was at the core of Lam Partners’ design philosophy.

Electric lighting, daylighting control and HVAC fully integrated into one system

As lighting technologies and lamp sources along with Energy Codes and soon-to-be Daylighting Codes have continued to evolve and change the way we light spaces, the philosophy of integrated and sustainable lighting design continues to be the backbone of Lam Partners’ work.

We may use new and different tools than we did 50 years ago to convey our lighting concepts, but the fundamentals remain the same.

Glass Bridge Lighting Study

Glass Sculpture Rendering

Whether AGI, Lightscape, 3d Studio Max, DIVA-for-Rhino, Ecotect, or Radiance/Daysim are used to analyze the electric lighting or daylighting or CAD, Revit, Rhino or Sketchup to model a complex space, the principles of visual perception, comfort, and pleasure are still the basis of our designs. Without a thorough understanding of these principles we, as designers, would not be able to create good luminous environments to work, live, and play in. Good lighting is the result of good architecture and is not possible without the careful integration of lighting and vision as part of the architectural expression.

Five decades later, as 2012 is well underway, with the leadership of Robert Osten, Paul Zaferiou, Keith Yancey, and Glenn Heinmiller, Lam Partners looks forward to the next 50 years of design challenges; balancing cutting edge technologies and methods with the legacy of integrating visual perception with architectural design.

Photo Credit: Stephen Jones (1), Nicholas Angelo (2), William M. C. Lam, Perception and Lighting as Formgivers for Architecture, 1977 (3), Nathanael Doak/Lam Partners (4), Barbara Karant (5), Stephen M. Lee (6), Kera Lagios/Lam Partners (7,8)

Glazing for daylighting needs to be chosen both for its visual character (clear, diffusing, etc.) and its technical light-transmission values. Commonly, the visual decision will come first. Do we want clear glass, complete diffusion, or something in between? Diffusing glass has its applications, but needs to be used with care. While it’s tempting to “solve” the problem of diffusing sunlight and controlling direct sun glare by using diffuse glazing, that glazing itself can also become a source of glare. Diffusing glazing with high light transmission, such as Kalwall, can be dazzlingly bright if it’s exposed to direct sun. If that’s in our field of view it can be a worse source of glare than the sun through clear glass because, unlike clear glass, it’s bright from all viewing angles. And of course diffuse glazing destroys outside views, which can be as valuable for well-being and productivity as the daylight itself. For these reasons, fully diffusing glazing is best used where it is not in direct view. Opal frits and silkscreened interlayers can provide a combination of diffusion with some clear views, however they may still become glare sources, similar to fully diffusing glazing. So let’s assume we’ve chosen clear glass (whether tinted or not) for its visual character – now what light-transmission values do we want?

All practical sources of illumination contain a mixture of visible light energy and non-visible energy. What happens to the energy in daylight after it enters an interior space? Assuming that our space is not open to the outdoors, typically only a small amount of the daylight will be bounced back through the apertures to the outside. A very tiny amount of the daylight energy will break up molecules in our fabrics, artwork and other fragile materials. The remaining daylight energy will all be absorbed in interior surfaces and converted into heat. Much of the time, especially in large buildings, that heat is undesirable and will need to be pumped out of the space by a mechanical system, consuming energy. Our choice of glazing can have a major impact on how much heat gain results from daylight.

No glass is totally transparent – only a fraction of the light that hits it passes through. The good news is that readily available glass types admit daylight selectively. In other words, the fraction of visible light that is transmitted is often different from the fraction of total light energy that is transmitted. So if we choose our glazing well, we can admit less total energy (heat gain) for a given amount of visible light than we would if there were no glass, just an opening.

A useful way to evaluate glazing is to look at the ratio of visible light transmitted to heat gain transmitted. A good measure of the heat gain is the SHGC (solar heat gain coefficient). This information is readily available from major glass manufacturers, and some of them even calculate the ratio for us. Viracon, for example, calls this the LSG (light to solar gain ratio), and provides it in their glass data charts. For example, their data chart for 1-inch low-E insulating glass with argon fill shows that for clear glass (VE 1-2M) we can get a visible transmittance of 70% and an SHGC of 0.37, giving a very favorable ratio (LSG) of 1.90. So using this glass will cut the heat gain nearly in half for a given amount of admitted visible daylight. If we use glass tinted blue-green, the ratio can even be a bit higher, 2.01, however that improvement may not be worth the resulting coloration of the daylight.

An interesting way to think about this is that we can say we are using selective glazing to actually improve the energy quality of the daylight itself. The technical term for this quality is “efficacy”, which can be applied to artificial light sources as well as to daylight. Conventionally, the visible light energy is measured in lumens and the total (heat gain) energy is measured in watts. So efficacy is expressed as lumens per watt. The efficacy of outdoor “raw” daylight from sun and sky combined varies with sky condition and solar altitude, but generally runs around 100 to 120 lumens per watt. So for one watt of heat gain we get 100 to 120 lumens of visible light. Interestingly, this is very comparable to efficient electric light sources. With a high-efficiency T8 fluorescent lamp, for example, it will take just about 1 watt (including the energy to operate the ballast) to produce 100 lumens. Large HID lamps (metal-halide and high-pressure sodium) can produce more than 100 lumens for each input watt. So, other things being equal, raw daylight and electric light would result in the same heat gain to our space. But once we have passed the daylight through selective glazing, we can multiply its efficacy by the LSG ratio, so for the clear glass example it’s now around 190 to 230 lumens per watt. This cuts the daylight heat gain more or less in half. The daylight would now also create half the heat gain of an equal amount of electric light. The key word there is “equal”, since in practice daylight levels in a space will often be much higher than electric lighting levels, with resulting higher heat gain (see Daylighting Reduces Heat Gain – Pantheon Redesign?).

If a design mandates a certain amount of glazing, we can adjust the daylight levels by choosing different visible light transmissions. For example, the designer may want to choose a lower visible-transmission glass if the amount of glazing in the design creates daylight levels which are higher than necessary. Choosing glass with a high LSG ratio is still desirable in that case, but as the Viracon data shows, the ratio will be lower than with high-transmission glass. So that design will be paying a penalty in heat gain from daylight (and probably from the U-value of the extra glass also), compared to a design using a smaller area of high-transmission glass to accomplish the same daylight levels.

In some cases, a design could even benefit from different glasses at different apertures, for example, a high-transmission glass at a small clerestory and a lower-transmission glass at a large lower window. This approach should be used with caution – when all of the glass is the same, we don’t perceive the glass transmission very clearly. But when two different glasses are visible from the same viewpoint, the lower-transmission glass can look gloomy by comparison.

Photos Credit: Glenn Heinmiller / Lam Partners (1), Stephen M. Lee (2), Glenn Heinmiller / Lam Partners (3), Brad Feinknopf (4), Glenn Heinmiller / Lam Partners (5), Glenn Heinmiller / Lam Partners (6)

Dassault Systems Boston Campus

Waltham, MA
Elkus Manfredi Architects
Keith Yancey, Jennifer Pieszak/Lam Partners

Photo Credit: © Chuck Choi

The ‘Right to Light’ is an awesome piece of legislation in the UK. Unfortunately, it doesn’t exist in the US, and references to it have even been shot down in court cases. The UK law, in layman’s terms, says that an existing property has the right to enjoy and benefit from natural light. So, if a developer comes along and wants to build a bigger building near your property, one that reduces the amount of light your property receives, then they can’t build what they’re planning to. There’s often compromise, but the law ultimately favors people’s rights to natural light. Now, quantifying how much light one is entitled to may get a little more complicated in a legal dispute, but the principle is good – and surprisingly straightforward.

As energy codes continue to evolve, though (and I should note that the ‘Right to Light’ is a zoning law), they seem to be getting more and more complicated. Some code language has become so complex that there’s a concerted effort to simplify it, for better or worse. In principle, I would agree that simplification is in the design community’s best interest, but we shouldn’t set ourselves back just because the math gets too hard. Code language should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.

When considering daylighting and the individual’s right to light, how can we ensure that everyone in a building gets a piece of that daylight? Currently we do no such thing. We simply say, through energy codes, that if you have any daylight in a building, irrespective of building size or proportion, then you need to provide lighting controls to take advantage of the potential energy savings. When we discuss putting daylighting requirements into codes, any language that doesn’t deal with energy is basically forbidden. There’s no home in the current code structure for anything relating to quality. It’s good that we’re at least conscious of one of the benefits that daylighting provides, but perhaps we’re ignoring the most important reason for daylighting a building: we ignore the human factor.

If you wanted to build the most energy-efficient structure possible, you would build a box without windows. Glass is a worse insulator than a solid wall; it lets heat enter into and escape from the building envelope. Historically, we had very large windows because they provided the sole means of lighting the spaces within – great for lighting, but bad for heating and cooling. So, once we developed cheap electric lighting, we did away with all that glass (reference most buildings built in the 1970s). Sure, energy use went down, but so did happiness. I personally went to a middle school where you had no idea what the weather was doing outside until you left at the end of the day, and I certainly would not want to spend hours on end there now. So if no glass is the most efficient, why did we start adding windows again? People’s comfort!

There have been numerous studies over the years, and a little common sense, that told us we went too far in the 1970s. Have we done enough yet, though? If people’s happiness is the real reason for introducing daylight into a building, why do some people still sit near the core of a building, with no windows in sight? Why are buildings even designed to have such spaces? If we are willing to sacrifice energy efficiency to make people happier, why do we only do a half-assed job of providing daylight and views for everyone? Social inequality? Perhaps. LEED does a great job of promoting daylighting and views as an indoor environmental quality issue, but it’s still optional, as is the whole rating system. Maybe it’s finally time to focus on what daylighting our buildings is really about and put it into code language – simple code language.

Is it possible, then, to establish a personal right to light, and does it have any other benefits? Think about it: if we need to provide access to daylight and views for every regularly occupied space in a building, our buildings will naturally get thinner, which begets natural ventilation as well as more useful daylighting. We’ll also be able to seriously re-work our interior space planning so that there are no poor souls trapped behind the solid wall of private perimeter offices. Storage rooms and transient spaces get pushed in, and occupied space spreads outward. Ultimately, the more we can rely on naturally available resources like daylight, the more sustainable a structure becomes.

A building without windows will never be able to be inhabited without energy. Can we say, then, that every individual in a building, in their main workspace, must have access to daylight and views? From a code-language point of view, does this approach help to simplify how we regulate the use of daylighting? It’s a personal ‘right to light’ that just might help us save energy and drive future sustainable design innovation. Is it really that simple and intuitive?

Photo Credits: Paul Sableman (1), Miles Gehm (2), Joel Bedford (3)