A high technology manufacturing environment offers the architect and lighting designer challenges that reflect the differing nature of the work done in the various spaces.And to meet those challenges successfully, it was recommended that designers must fully understand the exacting nature of the industrial tasks performed.The Lighting Research Centre at Reusselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA investigated the effectiveness of one particular lighting scheme by surveying the workers themselves as to their perception of the lighting.The findings of the centre DELTA (Demonstrations and Evaluation of Lighting Technologies and Applications) were protected in a case study conducted at the Sony Disk Manufacturing Plant in Springfield, Ove.
The Delta Team evaluated how well the Luminaires, light sources and controls performed in meeting the illumination programmes of five distinct manufacturing tasks.
Designers can apply these concepts and the lessons learned to other industrial and assembly-plant applications with similar task-specific lighting requirements.
Opened in 1995 as at state-of-the-art manufacturing facility for digital optical disks, the Sony plant operates 24 hours a day.The 324,800 square feet facility sits on a 120 acre, forested, park-like site and with 350 employees, it currently produces as many as 6.5 million disks a month.
The lighting in the Sony Disk Manufacturing spaces was designed to accommodate the many visual tasks involved in CD production and to meet clean-room standards for some manufacturing processes.In non-manufacturing spaces, the lighting provides good task visibility with a minimum of glare while accentuating the architectural design providing visual interest. The design team, Boucher Mouchka Larson, Architects and PAE Consulting Engineers, carefully co-ordinated architectural designs with lighting and control equipment.There were five lighting objectives for the design, which should be applied to school lighting.They are: –
Daylight first played its major role in sacred buildings and the admission of light through the massive elements of the fabric covered symbolism, which was irresistible to the architects of the great churches and cathedrals.It was in sacred buildings too that glass made the earliest impact; the use of stained glass in the great cathedrals was widespread by the 12th Century.The technique was pioneered in France and Germany and artisans from these countries often travelled Europe-wide to trade their wares and sell their skills. It is difficult to overstate the impact that a sunlit, stained glass window, of majestic proportions would have had on an illiterate peasant.For the task of promoting religious beliefs, it was “state of the art” remaining unchallenged for its visual impact until the cinema, nine centuries later.
Gradually, glass manufacturing became more established and costs came down.The land-owning classes were the first to adopt glazing, as violence and strife subsided and the fortification of their dwellings became of lower priority.Windows began to be larger and by the 16th Century we see the celebration of windows, as typified by the oriel windows in the Cambridge Hall (Fig. 27), Church in Medina, Malta (Fig. 28), Queen’s College, Cambridge (Fig. 29), Corpus Christ, Oxford College Library (Fig. 30) and the Clevestory windows at Guildhall in Lavenham, UK (Fig. 31)
It was in spinning and weaving that the saw most impact on building design.The need for light would have meant that production was crucially dependent upon prolonging the availability of daylight to a maximum.It must be realised that in the 15th Century, the real cost of artificial light was about 6000 times more than today (in relation to living costs).
Even before industrialisation, there were certain indoor activities that made real technical demands on daylighting. Writing, printing and painting all would have needed good light and with only primitive artificial lighting available, there would have been a heavy reliance on daylight.
Despite the increase in the use of glass in the 17th Century, mainly in the form of small by modern standards.This was partly due to structural limitation, especially in masonry buildings, although in grand architecture amazing structural features were achieved with stones and even moulded brick mullions.
Even though we look upon daylight as our principal source of light, it is important to remember that, especially in southern countries, it may be difficult to use directly in everyday working life because of its high intensities and constant variation due to sunpaths and meteorological changes.It is important therefore that architects envisage the visible environment as highly structured, three-dimensional light fields.Architecture becomes the shaping of this future luminance field.
Studies on lighting have considered artificial and natural light as equivalent, addressing merely the illuminance level.Studies had also shown to illustrate to what extent daylight is preferred over artificial lighting sources, making its quality as an illuminant an important reason for using it in buildings.Daylight, which is the combination of sunlight and skylight, is the light source that most closely matches human visual responses unlike artificial lighting. Years ago, the human eye evolved using this light spectrum as the source against which all other light sources are compared, thus daylight is likely to provide the best visual environment.
Often, designers are unable to determine whether a space is sufficiently illuminated or too dark. It is important to realise that the way surfaces are illuminated is often more important than how much light falls on them.
Taking all these points and realising the way technology takes over society, we are torn between good health and advanced technology.And taking all other aspects of life, we are known to select technology over good health as long as the technology makes our life easier, even for just a little while.
Most of the advances in science and industry during the past hundred years have been improvements in technique leading to lower production costs.Chemical industries pollute air and water and it is only afterward, when the damage becomes unbearable that measures have been taken to reduce the harmful effects.Insecticides and chemical fertilisers disturb the balance of nature and are exterminating more and more species.The automobile industry produces more and more cars: it was only after half a century in some attention being paid to safety and to the complete combustion of petrol.
Environmental problems these days can largely be met with the aid of instruments and formulae available now, but still insufficient attention is being paid to the factors that bear on the positive well being of the individual, completely ignoring the psychological factors.
The whole development of the technique of lighting up to this day has been inspired by the 19th Century conceptions of society, ignoring completely the well being of the worker and letting commercial interests dominate all research.
The future of daylighting looks more blink than bright.Due to the problems that dominate daylighting, there is the fact that accuracy is limited by the superficial treatment of the optical physics involved and its being commonly acknowledged that many daylight control implementations do not produce internal conditions that satisfy the occupants’ comfort criteria. The potential for energy-saving and improved internal comfort is apparent, but the means through which they can be achieved is less obvious.The ability to simulate accurately a wider range of architectural design options would undoubtedly help to establish those criteria that have the potential to provide the requisite benefits, otherwise the future of lighting hangs in the hands of new technology and heading to the end of daylighting schools even though the negative effects are obvious.The dynamic nature of daylighting needs to be understood and also the occupants’ reaction to time rate change, spatial distribution and relative contrasts caused by daylight in an enclosure.
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