The treatment of obstruction in interior lighting design— calculation of spacing-to-height ratio

Abstract

Most of the published work on the lighting of obstructed interiors is concerned with the development of calculation procedures to enable designers to investigate the lighting conditions in a quantitative or qualitative way for particular configurations of room geometry, contents and lighting equipment. This general approach is appropriate only if the designer has detailed knowledge of the space to be lit. In the design of a building where the eventual nature of the interior space is not known, more general design guidance for obstructed spaces is required in the initial synthesis stage of the design process. This paper develops the idea of extending existing guidance for lighting design for empty rooms by adopting a modified maximum spacing-to-height ratio which allows for obstruction loss and which could be used in addition to normal spacing-to-height ratio in installation design.