Au naturel

20 April 2011

“Entering the tomb he could tell that no one had been inside it for thousands of years. The one solitary window, high above him, allowed the feeble, dawn light to bleed in. Then, suddenly, the sun rose and the whole room was ablaze…”

I won’t win any awards for my fiction writing, but this simple sentence generates an image in our minds that we can instantly ‘see’. It is about the simple joy of natural light and architecture. The human connection with daylight is well documented and understood and, as we come out of another dark winter we can feel our spirits rise.

I am going to add to the clamouring voices asking us to re-engage with our past and help save our dwindling energy resources by making sure that the lighting design community is not just paying lip service to daylight design but taking it seriously.

Let’s define serious: BS8206 Part 2, Code of Practice for Daylighting; LG10, Daylighting and Window Design; BRE, Site Layout Planning for Daylight and Sunlight - a Guide to Good Practice - 2002. All, together with serious daylighting software such as Radiance, show a certain seriousness about the topic.

And you had better have head space for it too. Most jobbing lighting designers, like myself, know enough about designing with daylight to realise how important it is, but a colleague of mine has a PhD in the subject, together with a brain the size of a planet (all be it a smallish one). Now, that is what I call taking daylight seriously.

My plea comes as the design community reawakens to, in the case of some professionals, a lost art. Daylight has been well understood for thousands of years by architects and loved by estate agents up and down the country - ‘south facing’ is always a massive plus.

So what went wrong, why was it lost? Here I have to say that, despite my passion for daylight, my passion for artificial lighting has in some small part contributed.

So here we are and what to do? The place to start is the past. The past holds the key to how the best architects in the world, without the luxury of artificial light during the day (candles and oil lamps have been around for a very long time but were only used at night) have used buildings and their orientation to ensure that daylight gets in.

From the Roman architect Vitruvius to the Egyptians, from Hawksmoor to Sir John Soanes. And even after the birth of electric light there are great practitioners: Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, and today we have big names like Grimshaw, Fosters, Rogers and Bartenbach.

Good daylight has been well documented and executed in many buildings. It is the undocumented buildings that worry me - the schools, hospitals, offices and, yes, even data centres - that give me cause for concern and that cry out for attention to daylight.

And here I become depressed because, even though I understand why we have the numbers, they are often a curse as well as a blessing. The reason is, in my view, that any natural light is better than none at all.

Take light pipes. What are they all about? Why do they sell? They sell because people instinctively feel just a little daylight is better than no natural light at all. But the numbers culture, especially that which surrounds the Breeam daylight credit, can encourage a tick-box approach or a ‘it fails so let’s not bother at all’ approach rather than encouraging good daylight design.

Fortunately a time is coming when daylight will again take its rightful place as dwindling resources force legislation to place natural light back on the agenda. So, ‘let there be (natural) light’. And let’s all make sure there will be…