2019 - Daylight Symposium
"Daylight: a Concept and a Design Deriver" by Maha Shalaby
Speakers
Maha Shalaby
Architect and a sustainability specialist
White Arkitekter
Presentation from the 8th VELUX Daylight Symposium that took place in Paris on 9 October 2019. For more information please visit http://thedaylightsite.com & https://www.velux.com/veluxdaysinparis
Daylight plays a crucial role in the creation of sustainable and healthy built environments with people in focus. Light affects our body, physically and psychologically, and has a direct impact on our health and well-being. As students spend a lot of time at Schools, the impact of light in Schools is very important, and various studies has shown that the use of Daylight in Schools has benefits towards Students’ performance (increase up to 15%).
Emphasizing the importance of Daylight in schools, the proposed presentation will focus on a school case study that is planned to be built in Enköping, Sweden, that is being designed by White Arkitekter. The presentation will focus on how daylight as a concept was used in the school design both to meet the certification requirements in the project, but also ensuring daylight quality. A daylight simulation was therefore not considered as an end product that is checked at a later stage of the project, but instead was used as one of the primary factors for morphing the design concepts. Therefore, building performance simulations were integrated to inform the design process through an iterative process. These simulations included outdoor simulations for sunlight, and indoor environments to ensure healthy environments as they both have a great effect on the children’s productivity.
The daylight simulations were therefore different depending on the project stage and were constantly used to inform the project and optimize the building form. The start was using Vertical Sky component (VSC) indicator, followed by Daylight Factor simulations to meet the Swedish certification system (Miljöbyggnad), followed by Spatial Daylight autonomy simulations. The project started at the same time as the issue of the new European standard for daylight, which is going to be also reflected on in the presentation with regards to what the standard really means in practice, and whether it is applicable or not. The presentation will therefore be divided into two main parts, the first how light as a concept was integrated in the design process, and the second part is to show the methods used (through iterative simulations) to verify the daylight requirements, and how these methods reflect the applicability of the different certification systems and requirements. The case study is challenging as it is a big high-school campus with a center for continuing education in a small site. The challenge is also the weather in Enköping, which is similar to many cities in Sweden, where the sky is mostly overcast. The project was featured in three articles in the newspapers and will form a new hub in the city where people from outside the school can also benefit from the outdoor spaces and the buildings during the summer time in different ways.
Maha Shalaby works as an architect and a sustainability specialist at White Arkitekter with eight years of experience in practice, research and teaching. She studied her Masters’ in Energy Efficiency from Lund university, Sweden and she currently works with various simulations including simple and advanced daylight studies. Her passion lies in integrating her environmental design expertise with parametric tools and using the results from the assessments to inform the design resulting in a holistic way of working. Maha’s additional interests include visual comfort, circadian light assessment, assessing daylight quality in a space, and the perception of the space in virtual reality.
