A brief history of daylight in schools.Explaining its political/critical strategies and the natural tendency for people to turn towards the source of light, or as it is called “phototropism” and its importance in the design of lighting in schools, the determinations between quantity and quality daylighting.
The study of the 1990s work of Fielden Clegg Design Partners;John Cabot City Technology College, Bristol.The idea of the school building being used as a visual aid to students “legibility”.Discussing the concept of Fielden Clegg abandoning the flexibility of space and encouraging the use of solid walls as partitions.The combination of hi-tech and natural low energy buildings and adopting the theme that in response to windows, in daylighting: “less is more”.
Good daylighting design is inseparable from good architectural design and should be considered from the earliest stages of the design process.This is a more effective approach than applying daylighting techniques to a completed design.As good lighting is essential in all building types for a successful school building, a careful and informative approach is particularly important for they contain a varied range of activities embracing a complex array of different visual tasks, many of which may have to be carried out in the same room.It will also provide good conditions for children during their school life;not only so that they will not be handicapped in their learning but also that they may develop the habit of using their eyes intelligently and may carry into later life an awareness of the value of good lighting conditions.The most successful school building designs have been those in which planning to meet the educational requirements of the school is integrated with a skilful solution to the problem of providing for the physical needs of the occupants.This kind of solution is only possible with a detailed knowledge of the visual implications of the various activities in the school.
Prior to the Education Act of 1870 in Britain, schools provided for the children of the wealthy had been well funded.The provision of the Act to make education compulsory for all suddenly created a huge demand for school buildings and for them to accommodate much larger numbers of children within constrained budgets.This created the need to heat, light and ventilate large classrooms, at very low running cost.The provision of light and air in schools became a driving force in the evolution of school design, right up to the present day.E R Robson, Architect to the London School Board stated in 1874:Lighting from the side, especially the left side, is of such great importance as properly to have a material influence over our plans.”He goes on to give the rule of thumb – a classroom is only well-lit when it has 30 square inches of glass to every square foot of floor space.” (About 20% glass to floor area). E R Robson
He was also aware of the issue of visual comfort and the desirability of sunlight in classrooms, he writes:- It is well known that the rays of the sun have a beneficial influence on the air in the room tending to promote ventilation, and are to a young child very much what they are to a flower. Acting on this known fact, the builders of some schools have sought to secure as much sun as possible and produced results of light and glare painful in hot summer weather, either to teachers or pupils, or both.E R Robson (2).
The schools in Britain decided to move forward towards deep plans.Light for the Central Hall was “borrowed” light over the top of the tall classrooms.
This planning which is compact, suited the crowded urban site and the educational objective of centralised control through head teacher, teachers and assistants.Air quality was very poor in spite of using heating coils, roof-mounted cupolas and fans.A new plan was evolving by the early 20th Century; the compact form was no longer a necessity due to the suburban sites where most new school building was taking place.The new plan was essentially a row of classrooms connected to the hall and specialist rooms by open corridors.This gave unlimited light and cross-ventilation and satisfied a renewed obsession with light and air.
These schools did not suffer from overheating in spite of their large area of glazing, mainly by the fact that the fabric was massive, and the generous room height permitted useful ventilation, e.g. Earswick School, 1911 (Fig. 1)
The schools of the post-War boom were infamous for two major problems:thermal discomfort and glare.The Department of Education did not make matters better when they announced that every classroom should have a minimum daylight factor. (DF) of 2%.This led to nearly three decades of lightweight, over-glazed and poorly insulated buildings.The 2% DF requirement when applied to small or medium sized classrooms would demand virtually 100% glazing above the work-place, up to the suspended ceiling, the variation of Daylight Factor was excessive and the large area of sky visible from deep in the classroom led to superior glare problems. Even though the 2% DF was met, artificial lighting was often used in order to reduce the brightness range.
We are aware of lighting quality as to quantity in particular:the significance of uniformity ratio glare.
In the 1970s, some local authorities abandoned this form of school design and began to adopt heavyweight systems with small windows and a deep plan, necessitating artificial lighting and mechanical ventilation, e.g. Elmstead Market, Essex, England, where the integrated Environmental Design was put into practice. This approach was not welcomed by all authorities.For example, Hampshire County Council reflected the system building approach. The Architects’ work led to much richer envelope design giving greater opportunity for natural daylight and ventilation.
As architectural tastes moved firmly away from modernism, the adoption of a more traditional vocabulary, with a more varied envelope design, provided more opportunity for well-distributed daylighting.Despite these, in most cases daylighting did not receive special efforts:it was treated as a bonus, part of the ambience of the building, but not part of the functional brief.
The intentions of this dissertation are to study daylighting in schools and answer the questions of why should we use natural instead of artificial light?Why do we rely on artificial lights when natural light is so abundant?And to show how closely educational and architectural aspects of school design are interwoven in reference to daylighting and to see if there had been some improvements concerning daylighting in schools over the years.
As a vehicle for this investigation, I will study daylighting in four schools in Britain; the choice of these four schools was motivated by a clear set of intentions which link social and institutional practice to daylighting.
Each school – St. Mary Magdalene Primary School, Islington, 1960s; Hook Infants and Junior School, 1970s; Fleet Infant School, Velmead Road, Fleet, Hampshire, 1980s; and John Cabot City Technology College, Bristol in the 1990s, were nominated for awards as low energy school buildings in these years respectively.Rather than taking daylight measurements, these schools would be studied critically in view of the architectural characteristics relating to daylighting.
Until recently, daylighting has been unchallenged as the most suitable and economic technique for providing working illumination in school buildings.It would be true to say that no simple influence other than education itself has been so powerful in shaping schools as the need to secure good daylight. Almost every layout, plan form, section, window and daylight and toplight disposition has been influenced by this. In recent years, developers have reduced the cost of artificial lighting to the point when it has been necessary to re-examine daylighting methods to see whether this use has been solely because they are cheap, or whether daylight has in fact some special properties which makes it desirable on other grounds as well.
For over 80% of the floor area in most buildings, daylight factors fall in the range of 0 to 5%.Close to the windows, however, they can reach 10-15%.The values of the daylight factors, therefore, provide a guide to the brightness achieved in a room (or part of a room) from daylight.
J.R. Goulding (1)
Approach to daylight design has, like most other elements in design, been by precedent and experience. Until late into the 19th Century, daylighting design would not have been identified by the Architect as an important element in building design.Windows were closely related to architectural style rather than access to daylighting.Technical limitations and construction practice also influenced that design. Even though they depended greatly upon precedent and example, that did not stop some 19th Century architects being very systematic and consciously experimental. A good example is Sir John Sloane, practising at the beginning of the 19th Century; he combined his passion of painting with an experimental approach to daylighting design at his home in Lincoln’s Inn.Looking down on the roof of the main museum, one is struck by the resemblance to an experimental area of a research lab.(Fig. 2)
His imaginative approach was incorporated in his famous Breakfast Room at Lincoln’s Inn where mirrors and inter-reflected light were used to achieve a complex lighting effect. (Fig. 3)
Since schools and office buildings and characterised according to the general layout of their plans and these buildings are mainly for daytime use, it seems wasteful to consume a large amount of energy to provide artificial lighting.School buildings and office buildings have their own characteristics of size and shape, which up to a certain point are typifiable.
From the initiation of an architectural project, the distribution of volumes between perimeter and interior zones conditions the potential for daylighting.This zone distribution depends in great part on the relationship between the enclosure area and constructed volume.In order to express this relation, a coefficient of compactness is used.This would mean that a greater proportion of the total volume may be in contact with the exterior. The different connection between the exterior, by facades or roofing, influences the type of lighting conditions in the interior zones.As a general rule, school buildings are not slender, since they are usually low whereas their degree of compactness has a greater range of variation.
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