2007 - Daylight Symposium
HEALTH, ARCHITECTURE AND THE SUN by Richard Hobday
Speakers
Dr. Richard Hobday
Independent consultant
Sunlight has been used as a medicine for thousands of years. The ancient Egyptians practised sunlight therapy, as did the Greeks and Romans who had solaria on the roofs of their houses where they could sunbathe for health. So too did the occupants of the houses and apartments designed by Le Corbusier and other leading figures of the Modern Movement some two thousand years later.
During the first half of the last century – as in the ancient world – it was widely held that sunlit buildings were healthy and hygienic. In 1903 the Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to Niels Finsen, the Danish physician who put sunlight therapy at the forefront of medicine after centuries of neglect. In the years that followed, hospitals and sanatoriums were built so that patients with tuberculosis, rickets and war wounds could be exposed to the sun under medical supervision. Le Corbusier proclaimed in The Charter of Athens that: ‘To bring in the sun, that is the new and the most imperative duty of the architect’. Recent research supports this age-old belief: sunlit hospital wards have fewer bacteria in them than dark wards. Also, medical research shows that hospital patients with heart disease, clinical depression, jaundice, and those in pain recover more quickly when exposed to direct sunlight. There is also evidence that a sunlit environment benefits healthy people too, especially in the winter months, and that the light levels needed to promote wellbeing are much higher than those required for vision.
This presentation brings together historical evidence and contemporary medical research in support of a tenet once held by some of the most renowned figures in architecture: that sunlit buildings are much healthier than buildings that exclude the sun’s rays.
Richard Hobday is an independent consultant, researcher and lecturer. He is the author of The Light Revolution: Health Architecture and the Sun (Findhorn Press, 2006) and The Healing Sun: Sunlight and Health in the 21st Century (Findhorn Press, 2000). Dr. Hobday received his MSc and PhD from the School of Engineering, Cranfield University, where he specialized in solar design. An Energy Institute member and Chartered Engineer, he has been involved in a wide range of projects concerned with sustainability and health in the built environment.
