Let’s talk about daylight…

…and the reasons why we aren’t using it as we could with the newest technologies available for construction and why we aren’t designing for humans…

It’s no news that these days we spend a large portion of our lives in indoor environments. From a very early age, we spend indoor time in nurseries, then in schools, in universities, in offices, at home, in entertaining houses, in shopping malls, etc, etc, including the time in between, commuting from one place to the next, in trains, underground stations, cars, buses. Very rapidly, humans have changed from outdoor animals to indoor creatures, living in almost complete circadian darkness.

As a lighting designer, it is very hard to admit that the advent of electric light (something like 140 years ago) has greatly contributed to this sad situation. Soon enough, we started planning for technology, we replaced building regulations to suit and embrace this new technology and we started to see the sheltering qualities of buildings as the only manner of interacting with our environment. We forgot the outside.

Now, if we start re-thinking architecture and the way we would like to live in the next 140 years, I would like to think of daylight as a building material, a material without which architecture is not possible. If buildings intend to replace the joy of being outside (and that’s a tough thought), then it is obvious that daylight must be abundantly present.

And I like to think it is not only a matter of creating some openings to achieve some defined level of % daylight factor inside spaces. In my opinion, it is rather a matter of planning for the future. Energy prices will increase, we will need to be able to adapt. We need now to find novel ways (or look back to the past) and see where we can get light energy at no cost.

Back in 2007, at the first PLDC in London, I held a talk where I was discussing the history of daylight in office buildings, as part of the research for my master thesis. Back then I mentioned daylight as a free commodity. I still think we can (and probably should) look at daylight as a commodity. There’s no other producer of it than the sun, but it is an economic good which should dictate the architectural market. And if daylight hasn’t become (or seen as) a commodity yet, I’m sure it will rather sooner than later. But because it is free, we tend to forget or oversee what is there for us to take – with no expense to the planet.

The love for technology can be. But the love for technology cannot replace the love for humans and all human needs. And although daylight is a free building material, highly trained skills are required to shape it as necessary. It’s a funny thought that good architecture is known for its mastery use of daylight – rather than its mastery use of LEDs… Something to think about.

So, architecture and technology need to suit our human needs for natural resources – daylight, air and water, all of which we need to survive – instead of trying to replace those resources at a very high cost – monetary and planetary.

Hope you have enjoyed.

See you in the next post!

#thelightingtips