Episode 21: Light pt1

Light, natural and artificial, are essential tools in a designer's armoury. This podcast looks at natural light: how it illuminates buildings and the spaces within, and why orientation and the time of year can radically change it.

A later episode will deal with natural light.

Transcript

Kevin: 0:05

Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Make Life Better by Design with me, your host, and I suppose design obsessive, Kevin Drayton. In today's episode, I am going to talk about light and the ways in which it can make life better by design, um, which I will try, I think referring to as MLB. BD uh, now and again, see if anybody's listening. For architect designers, and of course, that's a designer with a capital D in this case, it's one of the most important considerations when you're designing. Now, there is a quotation about light in architecture, from the renowned 20th century architect Le Corbusier, Which as I'm sure you all know, uh, his real name was Charles-Edouard Jeanneret. Uh, it's a quotation that is that one in the same time, so true, okay, but also so mouth puckeringly, pretentious, you can use it, uh, at any dinner party and, uh, see what sort of response you get. Okay. Are you ready? You may need a pen and paper here. Here comes the quotation: Architecture is the masterly correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light. Light and shade reveal these forms. Right? That's enough of that. Uh, light clearly is fundamental to our lives, and the more skillfully we handle it, the better our lives are. No great surprise: I split light into two categories, natural and artificial, and I'll talk about each separately. Today, it's natural light. I'll look at artificial light, uh, another day. Natural light sunlight illuminates the outside of buildings directly and illuminates internal spaces or rooms as the layperson refers to them, thanks to the existence of windows, roof lights, and so on. However, architects and others often distinguish between sunlight and daylight. The former is where light streams directly from the sun and daylight is where sunlight reaches us via some form of intervention. The most common intervention is cloud, which diffuses sunlight, but it could also be by reflection, for example. It must be born in mind that windows usually have two functions. One: to let light in and two: to permit views out. Well, for now we're just concerned with the first one. Where the window or roof light or whatever is situated and how big it is makes a huge difference. The orientation of a window, that's to say which direction of the compass it points makes a big difference. Vertical windows are affected by the movement of the sun more than roof lights. It's true, a continuous strip of window in a, a circular or near circular wall, lighting a single space, would overcome that limitation. But apart from the tops of lighthouses and something like an observation tower, continuous circular windows are quite rare. So knowing which way a window and the room or space it illuminates is facing is critical. The sun not only moves from east to west across the sky. Of course it also rises and falls, and it does this differently as the seasons change. The room illuminated by a north facing window won't experience these changes as dramatically as the south or southeast or southwest) facing one will. That's why spaces where observational activities is critical, such as artists' studios or textile mills, are often lit by North lights. The colour consistency of North Daylight is highly valuable to such activities, despite the fact that natural light is essentially free. Light, quality, colour and strength varies with orientation. That's why colours and decorations can appear different in rooms with different orientations. Deciding that you like one particular paint colour doesn't mean it's going to feel the same, have the same effect in all rooms depending on how they're orientated. As natural phenomena, sunlight and daylight don't always behave as we would like. Now this is where you may see the acronym: UOS used to represent a perfectly symmetrical light source and it stands for uniformly overcast sky. Put all these variables together and it's easy to see why mitigation or intervention is so widespread wherever windows are used. Curtains, blinds, shading of different sorts, applied films and changes in glass itself are just some of the ways light passing through windows can be manipulated. I remember one of my first vacation jobs in an architect's office. The office faced south and the drawing boards were quite close to the windows and there were no blinds or curtains or anything. And as it was a a summer job, uh, it did tend to get very bright and you've got a lot of glare coming through the windows. It was during that stint that I found that tracing paper stuck onto a window pane is an excellent way of diffusing the light; gets rid of the glare, cuts down a bit of the, uh, the heat as well. So it's not surprising that all these different ways of, uh, manipulating light, uh, can prove an endless source of inspiration for designers. I suppose a good interview would be an interior designer if I can find one to guide us through the forest of roller blinds, Venetian blinds, vertical blinds, Roman blinds, blind blinds, blinds, and others in a future podcast. I shouldn't leave, uh, a look at natural light without acknowledging the relationship between light and heat. Solar radiation, uh, heat and light from the sun is produced because in very simple terms, our sun is a planet on fire and has been for a long time. Architects will talk about solar gain. That's the heat benefits from solar radiation that can save heating costs if it's skillfully handled. Conversely though, excessive solar gain must be guarded against as well. These phenomena can be controlled artificially with equipment and apparatus powered by fossil fuels, but growing awareness of the fragility of our home planet has made passive design solutions to these problems and opportunities, a big growth area for architects during my lifetime. I think that's really covered the essentials. There are many more alleyways to dive down, which I hope to do in future episodes, but I'll finish off, uh, with a note perhaps on the psychological benefits of sunlight. I always had a vague unease about the American country singer John Denver. But his song Sunshine on my Shoulders did convey to me the sheer joy and consolation that sunlight can bring. Although much of Denver's output was a bit too saccharine for me, Sunshine resonated in a way George Harrison's, Here Comes The Sun did not- much as I admired that song. One obvious point that I've not touched on yet has been the matter of shadow, which is an interesting effect of sunlight. It can be very positive. It's a source of some great effects in painting, but when it comes to overshadowing, it can also be a source of great conflict between neighbours. The right to light is an interesting idea and the way that the business of overshadowing, and also thinking about it the ability to see another property from a room in a house, uh, can run into problems with planning legislation. So it's another consideration. It's a bit like, do you have a right to a particular view that may get blocked by a new development that doesn't actually overshadow you. However, that's for another day. But I couldn't let this particular subject go, uh, without mentioning it. It, it can be very, very annoying if you are very pleased with the house; you're very pleased with the room, and then you realize perhaps too late that actually for a large part of the year, it's cast into shadow by, it can be foliage, can be trees and hedges and so on, as well as other buildings. One to watch out for when you're house hunting. So there we are. A short introduction to the use of natural light and ways in which it might be helped or manipulated to make lives better. As always, thank you very much indeed for listening, if you have. I look forward to seeing you again next time and goodbye for now.