Abstract
A new challenge is emerging. Contemporary built environment pedagogy demands engagement with both analogue and digital tools for simulation and verification of lit architectural environments. The use of analogue tools within architectural design education grasps onto the historically valued craftsmanship of drawing and physical models to measure, represent and understand our lit environment ambiance. Digital tools can provide efficient, simultaneous and precise verification of lit architectural interior space through 3D computer modelling and calculation software. However, the understanding and representation of daylit scenarios is becoming more numerically complex as lighting metrics and software gain in accuracy and dynamic range. With the majority of easily accessible software tools focussing on numerical verification, the ephemeral ambience that daylight in particular creates in interior architectural spaces is becoming ever more difficult to grasp for the architectural design student and practitioner. This paper seeks to challenge the exclusive use of digital tools for the understanding and representation of lit interiors by proposing that this methodology cultivates design epistemologies that are out of “touch”. Questionnaire findings and workshop studies are presented as pedagogical constructs are proposed inviting physical, experiential learning of lighting principles in collaboration with numerical and digital modes of learning to provide connections and translations to develop through ‘touch’ing light.
Highlights
As designers, we are trained to place value in the concept of spatial experience; we are increasingly asked to quantify our design intentions in terms of net energy balance. (1)
It is apparent that the understanding and representation of daylit scenarios is becoming more numerically complex as lighting metrics and software gain in speed, accuracy and dynamic range
With the majority of accessible software tools for environmental analysis focussing on numerical verification, the ephemeral and embodied ambience that daylight in particular creates in interior architectural spaces is becoming ever more difficult to grasp for the design student and new architectural design professional (2)
Summary
Contemporary built environment pedagogy invites engagement with both analogue and digital tools for simulation and verification of lit architectural environments. It is proposed that an understanding of and the ability to predict lit ambiance cannot be disregarded in architectural communities and educational establishments in favour of tools that allow for numerical building design energy output data sets or ‘optimised’ solutions with little engagement or skill in their creation and complexities in their interpretation. It is proposed that tools, providing primarily quantifiable data are in themselves ‘out of touch’ with design methodologies They do little to assist designers with the prediction of important insights into lit environment ambiances that relate to increasing understanding in the field of physiology and psychology of the visual and non-visual effects of light. The very character and purpose of light is dependent on a set of design principles which are revealed to the observer through experience, and not through a planar map of illumination levels. (1)
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