Adaptive and Sustainability for Visual and Perceptive Comfort: Neuroscience and Architecture

Abstract

Designing light and with light for historical buildings and the newly designed means conveying information, communicating, and enhancing, also making the spaces usable and visible and finally recovering the architectural, historical, and social value of building and environment. This fact implies a different light design aimed at the optimal combination between quantity and quality of natural and artificial light, ensuring quality of vision and perception, guaranteeing protection and preventive conservation. Nowadays, the LED technology both for spectrum and correlated color temperature tuning allows adding sophisticated functions to standard lighting solutions for energy saving and for using smart lighting technologies based on the human-centric lighting concept. This concept is an important part of the WELL Building Standard, finalized to a lighting system that provides well-lighting following the human biological cycle and making the environment comfortable and pleasant to live in. An interdisciplinary methodological approach for lighting design is proposed through research examples and realized projects. The method is based on the integrated use of photometry, colorimetry, and optics for the measurement and simulation processes. By means of the connection between neuroscience and LED lighting technology using the information theory, the proposed method allows a different results analysis and interpretation, identifying the quality of light that everyone likes and constitutes the common sense. It allows to assess the information content transported/transmitted by light, both as a recovery of the historical-philological meaning of a place and/or space-building, and as a guide along paths of new visual, perceptive, and emotional experiences, with a physical distance as proximity, due to the dramatic situation we are experiencing. The method is a useful tool for a new and beautiful, efficient, and effective lighting design, oriented to the optimal mix between natural and artificial light, with technical control/regulation systems (i.e., PIR systems integrated with COB/DALI) and bioclimatic solutions (e.g., plants, tropical plants that filter and transform light), minimally invasive, energy sustainable, and easily maintainable.