Daylighting

Dale Brentrup
8/16/13

Daylighting has always struck me. Through all the years its taught in school it seems like an optimization problem. We are taught to use one type of shading device, and from there, we use one of the many pieces of software available to us to optimize its position and orientation. From this perspective, daylighting is not a very interesting topic for designers. If the only goal is optimization, then there is no place for the designer, only a set of rules to follow. As a whole, given a finite number of distribution techniques, and an infinite amount of computational power, daylighting should be considered an optimization problem.

My first rethinking of this stance came from the reading. Its not that the article laid out the decision making process from a looser perspective, but it came from the use of genetic algorithms. The problem, in my mind, came from the decision-making process used in the algorithm. Such an algorithm is used when the final solution is not clearly defined computationally. Instead, the focus of a genetic algorithm is choosing a direction for the optimization, changing the weight of each variable, so that the computer can make calculations around the desires of the designer. If a genetic algorithm was a viable way of solving daylighting problems, then it could not be a pure optimization problem.

By recognizing that the problem of daylighting is about optimizing a set of design decisions, and not just about adding more shading devices onto a façade, I can give a much better description of the process. The processes seems very close to the decision making process that the visualization lab uses, where they have an established set of proven solutions that can be optimized, but primarily deal with the decisions that best achieve their goal. Thus, thinking about the daylighting problem computationally, the designer’s role is about choosing a combination of shading and reflecting techniques, and optimizing each part of the daylighting system.  This is way you see so many different approaches to the issue of shading; because daylighting isn’t inherently an expressive design approach, and thus, we must have different ways of achieving the same goal. If we didn’t, and the ONLY way to solve daylighting was through optimization, there would be no expressive qualities, and no place for the designer.