External shading form-finding: simulating daylighting and dynamic view access assessment

Abstract

Providing sufficient daylight and view access to the outdoors is crucial to creating a productive work environment and ensuring employees’ wellbeing and mental health in offices. To these aims, determining an optimum shading form can be challenging for designers. This study applied an ‘external shading form-finding’ and a novel ‘dynamic view access assessment’ method to find the optimum shading devices from 723 shading systems. Each system contains a typical louvre blade with two equidistant shading devices. These were externally fixed in front of a south-facing window with a dynamic interior blind, and were tested across three window-to-wall ratios. Optimum forms were selected according to LEED v4 daylight needs and unobstructed views. The results indicate that these proposed methods have the potential to support decision-making related to shading design, helping designers and architects to study the view quantitatively and combine its results with daylight assessment leading to improved building performance, employee mental health and wellbeing.