Daylight in Architecture

Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation. The relationship of a space with the daylight affects it’s design detail discovery, the way we perceive the textures and it effects our psychology. We feel differently on contrasting spaces because of the way the space is lit. The areas with a good interpretation of natural lightning tend to make us happier, contrary to the places with not very successful natural lightning, which make us feel stressful and less creative.

Based on the way a space is lit, we have three categorizations: The bright open hall, the room with a skylight and the room with the light entering from the side.

The open hall consists of a roof held by columns. We can see this type of design on Mahadeva Temple, Kaitabhesvara temple, Market hall etc. Architects have also tried to use this method of lightning on enclosed rooms.

When it comes to the achievement of excellent light, quality is more important than quantity. Having as much light as possible isn’t preferred to having good quality lighting.

Front lighting is poor quality because it doesn’t have good textural or shadow effect.

In the old theaters, floodlighting was used to give an enchantment feeling, and it also had good shadow effect so the audience can sense the textural effect too. In the modern theaters they use the opposite logic, even the richest materials appear flat and shoddy.

The room with a skylight is a room that is closed in all the sides and opened at the top. The most famous and dramatic use of skylight in architecture is the Pantheon in Rome, 126 AD. The lighting in Pantheon is so successful and so well-thought that many architects have unsuccessfully tried to copy it and use it in their buildings. It’s fascinating to see such good architecture being used back in that time.

The room with the light entering from the side is commonly used in the Dutch houses. It is used when there is no space for windows in the other sides of the building and the light comes only from one side. In an experiment by the School of Architecture in Copenhagen, they discovered that by shutting the lower shutters in a Dutch house the light evens in the entire room and by shutting the upper half the light concentrates on the window area of the room.

In conclusion, if you want to create a more concentrated area, we need to make the sources of lightning fall into one area, to give us the best quality of form ant texture. On the other hand, it we want an openness effect we cannot use this method because we need the light to spread all around the area.

Daylight is one of the only things an architect can’t control directly, so the way we build should adapt to the amount and quality of daylight there is.