Proceedings of: Workshop on Improving Building Design for Persons with Low Vision

Benefits (slide 2)

Daylighting has tremendous benefits: provides illumination for space, free illumination, provides thermal benefits in the areas of certain climates. It gives us energy savings from actually using electronic light sources, or it allows us to use electronic light sources in a sophisticated way with daylight sensors and other means.

It gives us a connection to the exterior, the natural world. We’ve talked about the circadian issues. It has great spatial impact which creates inspiration and beauty within our spaces. And, here is the classic example: the oculus (slide 2) providing light to our oculus, which receives that light as inspiration, beauty and a connection to the world -- to God in this case, or to gods.

Challenges (slides 3 and 4)

Daylighting in buildings, the potential challenges here are uncontrolled glare; the lack of transitions that can be overpowering. This is not just for a special population; this is for all of us. It’s funny that a lot of these studies show the glare on the computer. How about the glare on the person with glasses, or the glare on the person facing that sunlight because of bad orientation of a work station?

Uncontrolled heat gain. Again, we talked about uncontrolled, meaning that we have the ability to control our destiny by applying good, proper design. Let’s kick it back to old school. Let’s forget about when we could just air-condition the hell out of spaces, light the hell out of spaces, black-out spaces that we just put windows in, because we wanted the windows for the exterior effect but we didn’t want to actually look out those windows. But we control our destiny. We are architects, we are engineers, we should take control.

We have reflections issues. And location, location, location. [Light] can be an effective tool to draw us to a specific location. It can also be an ineffective tool, if it actually draws us away or pushes us away. So, where you place that lighting is critical. Design with it. Or no light at all: Obviously, there are cases where that can be a negative, or in some cases, if you don’t want somebody to go down that hall – maybe it has a dark end -- and that’s to say that’s not our destination. So, light can communicate, and buildings need to communicate to their users.

Why contemporary architecture is challenged (slide 4). Well, of late, in our particular issue, we seem to be at war with energy savings as one side of the coin and providing proper lighting as another side. Is that necessarily a battle, or is it just a challenge? I believe it’s a challenge.

There is a desire to bring in as much light as possible. Give us huge “lightscapes;” give us atriums. That will bring in a lot of light. Now we can’t use the atrium because it’s overpowering. So, harvest light intelligently. Harvest light appropriately.

New technologies: The window. A hundred-and-twenty years ago, windows – that’s as big as a glass pane could be, you know, 150 years ago. Technology has allowed us to be greedy with less. That’s what it is. We’re glass gluttons. And we just eat it up. We just take it in. We’ve lost the ability to savor the flavor of glass, to savor light. We just take it all in, but we’re not savoring it, tasting it, using it, making it ours, owning it in a way that’s intelligent.

Aesthetics with these new technologies. We create “excellence” by the photographs that we look at. In fact, we have awards committees who never see the spaces; never walk, smell, taste, encounter or feel the overpowering heat or the cold of the space or the glint of a light fixture that’s poorly placed. And yet, they give an award to those spaces because the photography was so excellent as to make us believe that that space was good. And if you don’t believe that, just go watch “Star Wars” again. Go watch a “Star Wars” movie, and see what the technology can make us believe.

And we have a faster-paced productivity in buildings. We’re less patient. Here, we have building traditions that some of them have gone for thousands of years: [from] classical architecture to Beaux-Arts architecture at the turn of our century. It’s a 2,000-year tradition. Now, of course, it’s changed over that period, but you see a tradition that has developed and had time to gestate as a building and design tradition. And yet, over the last 120 years, we have been through as many design labels and stylistic labels as there are pages in an encyclopedia.

We’re constantly changing. None of our traditions are having time to gestate. And the way we produce projects, it’s faster, faster, faster, and lower costs, and now give me the most excellent design possible. You get what you pay for.

And then there’s project accountability, and maybe some of it should be are we honorable? There are actual societal traditions that look at, you know, the honorableness of what you’ve produced. Now we depend on lawyers to fight it out, and hopefully the language is a variance.

Examples of Problems (slide 5)

Here are some spaces that were wonderfully intended, but here are the worst cases.

On the right we see this enormous atrium. Look at this uncontrolled light.

Here is a courtroom on the upper left-hand corner, where that swath of light is overbearing. I think this was either taken by my father or you, Jim, but that’s how my father encountered it, much worse than that. You’re looking at just a beam of light. Imagine your fate as a person [who is being tried in] a space like that.

Comment by Earle Kennett: I’ll tell you the argument about that, because I know this courthouse pretty well, and you’re looking from the jury [box] here. The jury [was expected to feel] more comfortable being able to look outside. That was the design intent.

Response by Greg Knoop: Did the intent drive the solution or did the solution drive the excuse of the intent?

And then, finally, a comment on office space in any one of our buildings, and it just shows the uncontrolled interior and exterior light – no blinds. I mean, what’s wrong with a miniblind? It may actually help dissipate some of that harsh contrast as my father looks at the person and says, who the hell are you?

Photographs can’t always hide the Problem (slide 6)

All of us architects here, and I’m sure many other professionals, are guilty of not realizing some of the things that we bring into projects. Here, from our collection in our office, [we are] trying to photograph a space that we designed well-intended. This is for a health-care client:

In photograph one [upper left], ‘I don’t like all [of] the glare that came from that one light at the end.’

So then another day we come up there and, ‘oh, well, that’s very dramatic but, ooh, that’s a little bit harsh’ [photo at bottom].

Now, of course we were harvesting it for the interior spaces that were using it, all wellintended. ‘Let’s just photograph it at night [photo at right]. That looks a lot better.’

But, you know, here’s an example of, ‘hey, we’ve got to show our great space.’ And so, the photographer goes to work. And, we didn’t do that with any ill intent, but we missed something.

We needed to be better informed, and that’s why we’re here, actually: as leaders in this process, to bring an impetus for a better mode of practice [and] to create a new layer of understanding for practice of architecture and engineering instruction.

Comment by Tom Williams: I think one of the major faults in architects now comes out of the mentality of architectural schools. The jury system at architectural schools was always geared to the visual image that you produced in a project. When I was in school we used three-dimensional models as well, but still, people knew very little of that kind of back in the ’60s when I was in school, about the effect of light glare, et cetera, on an interior space.

We were looking at passing the buildings and, you know, making a slick-looking presentation to wow the judges with. And that’s what happens with our jurors, our peers. We had peer reviews and we had our fellow classmates sitting there while we were being embarrassed by our professors.

The bottom line of this is this kind of mentality still prevails, and it prevails at GSA, our agency, where we have these peer reviews in the design excellence program. It’s all about what the peers say. Well, they’re all oriented to this visual image of the building, like you said. A lot of times they never go to these buildings and never experience the actual space. They look at all these slick presentations and decide what they like and don’t like. And that’s not the way you can judge whether a building is successful or not.

Response by Greg Knoop: Because the tradition was born out of the art tradition. Architecture is art. But it is a unique art; it’s more of a craft. It’s a special form that is for a user. First you provide shelter, safety. That’s our primary mandate – safety and shelter. And yet, we are letting abstract art drive the tradition.

Comment by [Participant]: I’d like to say that we have overdone shelter by blocking so much of the daylight. You know, we think shelter from the elements.

Response by Greg Knoop: Well, again, my point is that, regionally, we have to look for the regional architects who are living in [those] climates: they need to harvest and make use of the world around them. And we can encourage the [development of] code systems [and] other means, not just simply to do it because you get LEED™ points, but actually to improve the use of the elements around us.

Historic Examples (slides 8 and 9)

There are historic precedents for ways to manage our light and do so very beautifully. In the Middle East, for instance, light is overbearing, intense. They live in climates – at least in the desert areas – that are overwhelming. They use courtyards, mashrabiya screens, deep overhangs, and all sorts of means to manage light as well as other elements and actually to harvest them and make them beneficial to the buildings, including privacy and other issues.

This is our National Cathedral [slide 8, left photo], and just a reminder that even the ancient cathedrals of Europe, stained glass and other elements, although they might seem like they could be a dark space, they did provide inspiring, interesting and varied light.

Whether classical architecture – here is a close-up of a mashrabiya screen [slide 9, left photo] -- classical architecture with layering of the façade in order to create sort of a transitional point between the light source – this is our embassy in Chile [slide 9, right photo].

Modern Examples (slide 10)

Here is [transitional] space, a successful part of that design (upper left photo). Here is the Louvre over in Paris (right photo). They just used technology by putting a screening cloth in there, these giant pyramids, to create a really beautiful space.

Curtains, used smartly, can be effective (lower left photo). Now, that might be a little bit of a glare spot there, that’s probably because it’s uncontrolled back there.

There’s lots of technologies for overhangs and other things to assist in managing light as it hits the façade. But, again, they’ve kind of created the need for that because of the way they used glass: ‘Let’s just use a ton of glass until it hurts.’ Now we’re going to have to manage it. All right, let’s step back; let’s take some value managed concept on that. What’s getting us the best value?

Design Processes and Tools (slides 11 and 12)

We need to [incorporate] smart design and worthwhile investment (slide 11). Let’s get the best value solutions. Let’s start with an inclusive design concept, not just ‘I want to be a sculptural architect and do something really wickedly cool,’ but ‘I am addressing an owner and a population.’ Design for our population. Go back to basics.

Building orientation: Address it, not just with the whole building but even the details of the building, how they [should] address orientation, planned fenestration, holistic design.

Seek out technologies that support details that help the design aesthetic. So, it doesn’t mean that we just -- okay, we wanted a big glass; now we’ve got to stick something on it. Now we integrate those things and make it part of a better aesthetic.

And then there are available tools in computer modeling, and I’ll just show you this (slide 12). We did this space for Kaiser Permanente. This little one here (lower right photo) is the computer model of the space, and this is the actual space (left photo). And we did actually several views here, including looking at how daylight went through some skylights where the light hit in certain scenarios so that it wouldn’t bake people who were sitting in the waiting areas.