The thesis discusses the characteristics of natural light that are visible inside concrete buildings designed in the late twentieth century. The study addresses three major objectives. First is to identify the characteristics of natural light visible inside these spaces. Second is to understand the use of natural light to illuminate different spaces. Third is to explore the relation between the characteristics of natural light and the overall perception of the space. With these objectives in mind, a comprehensive literature review was done to develop the hypotheses for this thesis. The first hypothesis states that the overall perception of a space is affected by certain basic characteristics of natural light. The second hypothesis suggests that the overall character of a space can be enhanced by emphasizing the source of natural light as a visual element. To test these hypotheses, this thesis studies the effect of natural light in three buildings made out of reinforced concrete in the late twentieth century. The three buildings are the Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut Ronchamp by Le Corbusier, the Kimbell Art Museum by Louis I. Kahn and the Church of the Light by Tadao Ando. The method of analysis is based on the selection of a spatial envelope in each building that helps to provide an ideal framework for studying the effects of light. The method takes into consideration the principles of visual perception and the use of images depicting the varied effects of light inside the spatial envelope. The results of the analysis show that the three projects employ similar design principles to achieve some of the common effects of light, and the listed characteristics of light in relation to the overall perception of the space do not vary to a great extent when moving from one project to another. The emphasis on the source of natural light is a common and recurring theme in all three buildings. The thesis concludes that the results support the hypotheses, and that the quality of a space is dependent upon the way a designer brings natural light into the space.

A New Community Park for Wellness presents a new vision for parks. It proposes a new era of park programming, the ‘Community Wellness and Holistic Health Era’ in order to improve our communities with design that highlights natural phenomena. Today, health is no longer about disease or death; it’s about maintenance - getting outside, having access to fresh food and living a balanced lifestyle. Drawing on historical and contemporary wellness precedents, this practicum aims to create a community destination that promotes health and prevents disease in Winnipeg, Manitoba. It documents investigations into park programming and design, current trends in health and wellness, potential roles of light and water in landscape architecture, and light in modern and post-modern Scandinavian architecture. The final design emphasizes natural phenomena and processes related to light, water and energy in order to promote health and reconnect urban residents with time, place and the changing seasons.

A New Community Park for Wellness presents a new vision for parks. It proposes a new era of park programming, the ‘Community Wellness and Holistic Health Era’ in order to improve our communities with design that highlights natural phenomena. Today, health is no longer about disease or death; it’s about maintenance - getting outside, having access to fresh food and living a balanced lifestyle. Drawing on historical and contemporary wellness precedents, this practicum aims to create a community destination that promotes health and prevents disease in Winnipeg, Manitoba. It documents investigations into park programming and design, current trends in health and wellness, potential roles of light and water in landscape architecture, and light in modern and post-modern Scandinavian architecture. The final design emphasizes natural phenomena and processes related to light, water and energy in order to promote health and reconnect urban residents with time, place and the changing seasons.

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Most available techniques for predicting internal daylight illuminance do not take into account reflected sunlight, nor the fact that under clear sky conditions the direction of the illuminance is usually upwards, not downwards from the sky. The general goal of this study is to investigate the issue of predicting the internal illuminance from natural light in clear sky conditions. This includes the possibility of proposing a method based on the concept of the average daylight factor for use in sunny climates. This thesis is divided into eight chapters. After introducing the problem in Chapter One, Chapter Two is a literature review of problems associated with utilising natural light in sunny regions. Chapter Three is the statement of the problem and how it will be solved. Existing equations for finding the average daylight factor have one thing in common: they assume that the incident light on the window comes directly from an overcast sky or by external reflection from it. If any of these equations are to be used under clear sky conditions, or a new method is to be developed based on the same concepts, the sensitivity of average internal illuminance to the direction of external light needs to be tested. A study of this is described in Chapter Four. Chapter Five tests, by numerical simulation, the performance of existing average daylight factor methods under clear sky conditions. It is concluded that they are not appropriate for sunny regions. The tests, and the conclusions from Chapter Four, do, however, suggest a new approach. This has two bases. The first is that it has been shown to be possible to relate incident light on the window plane to horizontal sky illuminance, and this sets a minimum condition for window design. In practice this can be used in conjunction with a limiting maximum window size based on heat gain and other environmental issues. The second basis is a new formula for relating average internal illuminance to external window plane illuminance. The overall result is a formula for predicting internal illuminance as a ratio of external horizontal sky iluminance. In Chapter Seven this approach is tested. Two methods are used: field measurements under real sky conditions, and comparison with detailed calculations.

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This thesis aims to explore architectural experience by addressing how different types of openings exert an impact to the space. The openings not only play a critical role in giving a palpable presence to natural light in a space, but also facilitate a specific way of seeing the world – together generating a spiritual resonance through a sequence of well-designed spaces. The journey happens in a four-story tower, which is influenced by four parts of a tree, providing a space to experience tranquility removed from a chaotic world and to gain a deeper understanding of the trees. With an emphasis on the manipulation of natural light and views, certain kinds of atmospheres are created on each floor to shape the perception of space. / Master of Architecture

The field of lighting design is a highly specialised one. The control and manipulation of both natural and artificial light is a difficult aspect of building design. Proficient architects, interior designers and engineers must currently draw on their own experience and resources to evaluate their lighting designs. However, most often lighting design is overlooked and not fully understood by building designers. Those lighting designers that do have a good understanding of lighting are hampered by current conventional design methods when dealing with alternative and creative lighting designs. This is especially the case when dealing with natural daylight which tends to be under utilised, particularly in climatic areas that differ greatly from the European standard daylight design skies.There is clearly a need for a tool that enables building designers to quickly and accurately evaluate their use of localised natural light and specific artificial light in their building designs.The recent development of accurate, physically based computer models and the resulting photo realistic computer rendered images, can provide the basis of a platform for lighting designers to visualise their lighting designs. Such lighting platform enables designers to make more informed design decisions when looking at new approaches and unusual situations.The aim of this thesis is to explore and formulate a working example of such a lighting design platform, where by designers can easily evaluate lighting and daylighting designs based upon real world lighting and localised atmospheric conditions. / The designer is presented with an easy to use graphical user interface, that is able to produce a photometrically accurate photo realistic computer image.This platform was achieved through the development of three key areas. The first was the creation of a process of integrating a specific physical based rendering program, RADIANCE (Ward 1996)into an existing three dimensional computer aided design modelling package. The second area consisted of creating a localised daylight model suitable to improve the accuracy of the physical based renderer when dealing with specific local atmospheric conditions. This daylight model was based on Kittlers' sky irradiance model (Kittler 1982a). The final area was the development of a graphical user interface that provides an easy to use, front end to the lighting design platform.The results of this thesis exist in a working suite of programs and graphical user interfaces where local daylight and atmospheric condition can be specified and a photo realistic image of a design produced. The success of this platform can be demonstrated by the quality of the images that are produced. A designer can begin to use the interface with ease after very little instruction and thus start to quickly evaluate their design in terms of lighting manipulation and control. This ability to visualise and assess lighting and its effects, both natural daylight and artificial, will inevitably lead to a higher quality of successful building designs.

In response to environmental concerns, demands for improved energy efficiency and a desire to create a more pleasant working environment; building designers are looking for ways to make better use of natural light. However, whilst natural light is both free and non-polluting, it can also produce high levels of visual contrast and glare, and unwanted heat. Most current design techniques estimate the natural internal illumination that results from an overcast sky; they do not include the contribution by direct sunlight entering the space, which is often the source of unwanted characteristics. Whilst a sophisticated computer ray-tracing program (RADIANCE) exists that can predict the full range of natural illumination, each prediction can take several minutes (or longer) to calculate. The time required to examine how a natural lighting design behaves over a typical year can therefore be prohibitive. Techniques for estimating the illumination provided by artificial lights also predict illumination under static conditions. Current techniques are therefore unsuitable for examining the dynamic behaviour of a lighting design, which links the automatic control of artificial lights to the changing levels of natural light. The aim of this research was to develop a computer based lighting design tool that overcomes these limitations. Based on the calculation of lighting coefficients, the numeric relationship between the luminance of light sources and the illuminance they produce, the Dynamic Lighting System (DLS) is able to calculate time-varying illuminance from a combination of natural light and artificial lights controlled by a lighting control system. The DLS has been written using the platform independent programming language Java. It is therefore able to run unaltered on most computer platforms, although in practice is limited to platforms on which the ray-tracing program RADIANCE will run, as RADIANCE is used to calculate coefficients. The DLS has been tested by comparing predicted levels of illuminance with levels measured in a test room under real sky conditions. These comparisons showed a high degree of correlation, but with a few large discrepancies. Possible causes of these discrepancies are offered and suggestions made about how they might be eliminated.

Healthcare workers' overall performance and patients' well-being are crucial to wellness design and the overall productivity of the working environment. The purpose of this thesis is to narrate how natural light - a key aspect of biophilic design - can give great health outcomes and enhance the placemaking of a healthcare setting. Hence, this dissertation attempts to deal with placemaking and formation as an inside-outside dialogue that connects users to nature by implementing the idea of transitioning natural light through space and structure. In doing so, lighting explorations were conducted as series of physical models and case studies to help understand and analyze various effects of light at different times of the day. These explorations narrate a story about the journey of the medical worker and the patient throughout the setting of the apertures, walls, path, and canopy. Also, in response to the topography, a south-facing aperture wants to be framed, while a north-facing aperture can be an open wall, a smooth polished continuous wall and path can act as a canvas when the filtered light falls on it, while rough fragmented walls rise from earth acting as structural walls, and a cluster of trees can act as a natural canopy to provide shelter from the sun, while a steel canopy can shelter other areas from the rain or sun. / Master of Architecture / Biophilia, the innate human instinct to connect with nature, is a foundational concept to biophilic architecture. This concept seeks to enhance the well-being of users when in a human-made environment, by incorporating vital aspects of nature in a building. Therefore, applying a biophilic-based design approach to a high stressed place like a hospital can be worthwhile in numerous ways to patients, their families, and healthcare workers. The thesis addresses the aspects of Biophilia and looks deeper into the effects and benefits of natural light in a healthcare setting.