2017 - Daylight Symposium
"Daylight at masterplan stage" by Paula Longato and Alexander Rotsch
Speakers
Paula Longato
Lighting designer
Arup
Alexander Rotsch
Lighting designer
Arup
Lecture from the 7th VELUX Daylight Symposium “Healthy & climate-friendly architecture– from knowledge to practice” that took place in Berlin on 3-4 May 2017. For more information visit http://thedaylightsite.com
“Daylight at masterplan stage” by Alexander Rotsch and Paula Longato. There is a growing interest in cities. We are more engaged in advising planners and developers on means to optimize value in existing or constrained assets. It is becoming harder and harder to create value out of these. But a lighting designer can bring his or her experience of lighting and demonstrate how a carefully planned massing can create beneficial and well-exposed spaces. Well exposed apartments or a series of offices or open areas will attract more interest, more users, and more value.
A city is an evolving entity: we need to be able to design new elements within the existing complex systems. Daylight and sunlight are a fragile attribute of this existing urban texture: a taller building, poorly planned will create a shadow for the years to come and will completely transform a place. On the other hand a taller building may be the answer to the growing population; therefore a taller building may be a necessity. How can we ensure that this necessity of growth is combined with the necessity to preserve a certain city look, a character, with success? Sunlight and daylight availability is often defined at masterplan stage as a result of a volumetric distribution. This is often the result of program requirements and planning restrictions but very seldom is driven by daylight and sunlight.
This is because there is not a common method for informing the designers of daylight and sunlight availability at masterplan design. UK has a solid method for planning of daylight and sunlight at masterplan stage, but this method is fine-tuned on the specific climate and latitude of the country. We aim to have a generalized tool and benchmarks that will allow planners to apply good design principles for daylight and sunlight access at masterplan stage, for any site condition. A new method to assess the character of daylight in the urban environment is proposed. A tool using multi-masking images overlaid enables us to analyze the daylight character of an urban space, which can then be adjusted to the desired planning goal. It could happen that an area which will be a park in the future gets overlit.
Too much daylight can be uncomfortable for such a space and therefore planners now have a tool to decide how to overcome such issues. The façade of a building receives too less daylight because the adjacent buildings are too tall? This can be easily identified with the methodology and tool proposed. Setting out thresholds for different latitudes across the globe will be the next challenge. What is considered to be enough daylight in a European city may not be as good for an Asian city and vice-versa. In a few months time we hope to have come up with some defined targets of what is good daylight in the urban space, at masterplan stage for different cities in different latitudes. While we look further into the future, there might be an opportunity to improve urban planning legislation, having daylight as a main driver.
Paula Longato is a lighting designer with the Arup team in Berlin. Paula studied Architecture and Urbanism in Sao Paulo, Brazil. After her studies she worked as an architect for leading construction firms and later as a lighting designer. In 2006 she moved to Germany to do her master's degree in Architectural Lighting Design, which she concluded with her thesis on Daylighting in Office Buildings. Since 2008, Paula has worked with the Arup lighting team in Berlin and has since delivered several international projects, including buildings in the educational, commercial, transportation, private and public sectors. Some of these projects received lighting design awards from recognized organizations. Paula’s passion for daylight and lighting can be seen in her continuous effort to create sustainable and human-centric designs. Alexander Rotsch is leading the Lighting Design Unit for Arup in Germany.
The experienced, passionate and multiple award-winning lighting designer joined Arup in Berlin 2012. Over the last 16 years, he has been working as a team leader and project manager successfully executing more than 50 national and international projects. Alexander studied architecture at the Bauhaus-University in Weimar and at the École Nationale Supérieure d ‘Architecture in Paris. He specialized in daylight and architectural lighting design and the development of high-quality custom solutions for lighting and luminaires. The Städel Museum in Frankfurt, which has won six lighting design awards worldwide, or the new headquarters for Amorepacific in Seoul, a large Korean cosmetics company, are both projects bearing his mark for sophisticated lighting design.
