Visual Delight in Architecture

Daylight, Vision, and View

Lisa Heschong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000378962
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Arquitectura general

Visual Delight in Architecture examines the many ways that our lives are enriched by the presence of natural daylight and window views within our buildings. It makes a compelling case that daily exposure to the rhythms of daylight is essential to our health and well-being, tied to the very genetic foundations of our physiology and cognitive function. It describes all the subtlety, beauty, and pleasures of well-daylit spaces and attractive window views, and explains how these are woven into the fabric of both our everyday sensory experience and enduring cultural perspectives.

All types of environmental designers, along with anyone interested in human health and well- being, will fi nd new insights offered by Visual Delight in Architecture. The book is both accessible and provocative, full of personal stories and persuasive research, helping designers to gain a deeper understanding of the scientific basis of their designs, scientists to better grasp the real-world implications of their work, and everyone to more fully appreciate the role of windows in their lives.

Part 1: Prediction

1. Planetary Rhythms

All life forms on our planet must find ways to adapt to environmental changes in order to stay healthy, grow, and reproduce. Those that are most successful also correctly anticipate major environmental changes—those that might impact their ability to metabolize, grow, and reproduce—so that they can prepare and quickly adapt to the new condition. Humans are no exception. Thus, the more successfully we can predict the future, the more successfully we can thrive.

The most fundamental environmental change experienced on our planet is the daily cycle of light and dark. Predicting that day will follow night might sound ridiculously obvious and simplistic, since we have all lived with regular cycles of day and night since birth. However, the extreme environmental contrast between day and night—brighter, warmer days fueled with intense solar radiation, followed by darker, colder nights—and the continual variation of that rhythm, have profound implications for every life form on the surface of the Earth.

We all know that as Earth orbits around the sun, it also spins on its axis every 24 hours. Yet not every planet does this: the 24-hour time period is unique to our planet. Early in the evolution of life, single-celled organisms developed an internal genetic clock, called a circadian rhythm, to help predict the timing of day versus night. These internal clocks have been found in the genetic mechanisms of every life form so far studied on the surface of the planet,¹ including the most primitive cyanobacteria, and have been preserved through millions of years of evolution in the DNA of every cell in the human body.

There are, in addition, two other very important planetary rhythms which further complicate things: yearly seasons and lunar cycles. Because the Earth tilts on its axis as it orbits the sun (at 23.5°), the intensity of solar radiation and the length of day versus night varies with the seasons. On the side of the planet tilting towards the sun it is summertime, with longer days and shorter nights, while on the other half tilting away it is winter, with shorter days and longer nights. Twice a year the tilt perfectly aligns with the plane of the Earth’s orbit, on the days called the equinox. On just those two days, once for the spring equinox and once for the fall equinox, everywhere on the surface of the planet, day and night are of exactly equal length, 12 hours each. In between those two special days, the days grow progressively longer until midsummer, known as the summer solstice, and progressively shorter until midwinter, known as the winter solstice. At the extreme conditions, at the North and South Poles, there are many days where the sun shines continuously for 24 hours during the summer and never rises above the horizon during the winter. Adapting to the continuously changing lengths of day versus night is a key function of our circadian system.

The second complicating factor, lunar cycles, are created by the moon’s orbit around the Earth about once a month (every 29.53 days). The moon’s gravity pulls the oceans towards the moon, creating a complex pattern of daily and monthly tide cycles: a lunar rhythm which profoundly influences marine organisms. In addition, sunlight reflects off of the moon, following a monthly pattern of waxing and waning between a very bright ‘full’ moon and a completely dark ‘new’ moon. This change in the brightness of moonlight at night is also extremely important to nocturnal organisms, as they either hope to hide from predators in the darkness or seek out food and mates in the moonlight.

The interaction of these three planetary rhythms—the Earth’s daily rotation, its tilted yearly orbit around the sun, and the moon’s monthly orbit around Earth—creates enormous rhythmic complexity. All life forms, including humans, have found ways to respond to this rhythmic complexity, using a variety of sensors and mechanisms that collect information and provide continuous feedback about changes and trends, enabling better prediction of future conditions.²

Calendars

Humans have been trying to understand the interactions of these rhythms since ancient times. In every known culture across the planet, people have been preoccupied with measuring, recording, and predicting the passage of time. Neanderthals may have counted days and months with scratches on bones and stones. Stonehenge and other Neolithic structures were created as solar and celestial observatories in order to predict the seasonal timing of sunrise and moonrise. The earliest written records of a calendar are from Sumer and Egypt. The priestly classes were charged with correctly keeping the calendars to predict the best planting and harvest times and determining the days for yearly rituals. However, every few years these early calendars inevitably drifted a few days out of sync with true solar time, necessitating an official declaration to make a formal correction.

The Romans also struggled with creating a civil calendar, based roughly on lunar months, which would stay properly aligned with the solar year. They did this by adding a few extra days during the winter, when needed: February was their preferred ‘flexi-month’ to bring the coming calendar year into better alignment. The Julian calendar instituted by Julius Caesar in 46 BCE added one extra day to February every four years to account for the extra six hours that were not included in a 365-day calendar. But the Julian calendar was slightly too long and still required occasional adjustments by decree. By the sixteenth century it had drifted by ten days. A revised calendaring system, named the Gregorian calendar for Pope Gregory XIII, was instituted by the Catholic Church in 1582, and gradually adopted by governments around the world, to the point where it is now the most widely used civil calendar internationally.

We humans are now fluent in thinking of the passage of time via the days, months, and years of our calendars. With various types of clocks, we found ways to subdivide our days into hours, minutes, and seconds. With ever more sensitive instruments, we have found ways to use the natural vibration rate of electrons pulsating around an atom to enable measurement of increasingly smaller units of time, such as nano-seconds—one billionth of a second. This precision enables our global communication, via signals from satellites which keep our computers, cells phones, and GIS mapping systems all in tight synchrony. However, this continuing progress in technological competence may have made tracking time so easy, so obvious, as to have blinded us to the essential relationship of all life forms to planetary rhythms, and our fundamental dependence on that timing for our own health and well-being.

Subtle variations in daylight are some of those planetary cues that help every cell in your body know what time it is. If your bedroom has a clear window in it, the light receptors in your eyes will sense the arrival of dawn even before you open your eyes. The slow fading of daylight at sunset, from the last amber rays of the sun to the darkening night sky, also primes your body to get ready for restorative sleep. Thus, exposure to natural patterns of daylight illumination, especially via windows in our buildings, wherein we spend the majority of our days, and indeed, the majority of our lives, provides a profound biological link to planetary rhythms.

Adequate exposure to daylight illumination for all humans was something that could easily be taken for granted in earlier times, when people spent more of their lifetimes outdoors. However, in today’s more technological world, people can easily spend days, or even months, entirely indoors. Thus, the design of our habitations, workplaces and cities to provide sufficient access to daylight for everyone is a critical challenge for our time. Done well and artfully, it will not only help to maintain the health and well-being of our growing population, but also provide the visual delight that sustains us emotionally.

Life’s Daily Breath: Chlorophyll and Oxygen

Before we delve into the implications for urban and architectural design, it is instructive to consider the deep evolutionary roots of our circadian patterns. From the oceans we can more easily understand the fundamental ways that the sun’s radiant energy during the day, and lack of it at night, drives oxygen cycles, food cycles, circadian biology, and vision. It was about midway through our planet’s existence, i.e. about two to three billion years ago, that photosynthesis evolved, creating a new way to transform the radiant energy of the sun into chemical energy that could be stored as sugar. A new molecule mastered the process of using the energy in visible light to transform a handful of water molecules and dissolved carbon dioxide (along with two by-products, some extra oxygen and water) into one molecule of sugar. This is the chemical process of chlorophyll-A, which forms the essential basis of most plant life, and of oxygen production on Earth.

In order to utilize chlorophyll successfully, early organisms had to find just the right balance of solar radiation within the ocean’s waters. The chlorophyll molecule absorbs light energy at the two ends of the visible spectrum, in the long red and short blue wavelengths, while reflecting most of the green wavelengths in the middle. This is why organisms with chlorophyll appear greenish. Ultraviolet radiation (UV), on the other hand, inhibits the production of chlorophyll. UV is so energy-intensive that it can break down organic molecular bonds within a cell and destroy DNA. Thus, in order to survive and to find just the right energy balance to produce their sugars, these simple photosynthetic organisms, collectively called phytoplankton, need to float deep enough in the water to avoid most UV radiation, while still receiving enough blue and red light to manufacturer their sugars. Finding just the right balance of light to support photosynthesis in ocean waters is a highly dynamic process, because the ratio changes with the daily and seasonal angle of the sun, along with the changing clarity or murkiness of the water.

At night, in order to continue fueling their metabolism, phytoplankton reverse the process and consume some of the sugar stores and extra oxygen they made during the day. Thus, during the day when they have sufficient light to make chlorophyll, they are producing oxygen and releasing it into nearby waters, while at night they are reabsorbing some of the oxygen. The chlorophyll production is therefore also driving the daily oxygen (and carbon dioxide) balance in the upper layers of the ocean, increasing oxygen levels during bright days and decreasing it during the dark nights. Like a daily breath, they are exhaling oxygen during the day and inhaling it at night.

Zooplankton and Bioluminescence

Zooplankton are another type of plankton, but which cannot make their own food supply via chlorophyll. Instead they survive by eating those who do, and thus they are classified as animals. Zooplankton tend to reverse the movements of the phytoplankton, sinking deep into the ocean’s waters during the day, feeding off the nutritious ‘snow’ of dead micro-organisms drifting down towards the bottom, while avoiding UV radiation and any surface-dwelling predators. Then at night, they engage in a great vertical migration, moving upwards to feed on the phytoplankton living closer to the surface. This daily vertical migration has been called the largest migration in the world, based on sheer biomass and the range of organisms involved.

This vertical migration is driven primarily by light, or rather the lack there of. The zooplankton are seeking darkness. Research suggests that much of this vertical migration is driven by circadian rhythms embedded in the genetics of each creature, and controlled by melatonin, the same hormone that in humans signals the presence of darkness. However, there is also evidence that these tiny creatures have photoreceptors that are prompting them to moderate their migrations, because it has been observed that the height of their migrations is less in the presence of moonlight and greater when the moon is darkened by cloud cover and or a lunar eclipse.³ Such photoreceptors in microscopic organisms driving their behaviors might be considered the evolutionary beginning of vision.

Zooplankton have another very surprising feature: they can make their own light. Most have a capability for bioluminescence, i.e. they can glow like a firefly. Indeed, Dr. Steven Haddock, a bioluminescence researcher at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, has developed evidence that upwards of three-quarters of all marine organisms have the ability to make their own light via bioluminescence!⁴ If these creatures are seeking darkness, why would they need to glow?

Some deep-sea organisms are known to use bioluminescence as a lure, to attract prey with a little glow imitating the movements of their favorite fish, or like fireflies, as a sexual attractant to find mates. While there are many possible evolutionary theories for the survival value of bioluminescence, one of the most intriguing is to create a cloak of invisibility. The color of almost all bioluminescent molecules is blue-green, the same color as the ocean above. By self-glowing blue-green, the creatures no longer cast a shadow or create a silhouette, especially when viewed from below against the brighter waters above. Rather, by glowing themselves, they can blend into the sparkles, reflections, and diffuse blue-green glow of sunlight or moonlight. Thus, they are most likely making their own light not to see, but to be un-seen.

It is striking how these extremely simple organisms organize their lives around the cycles of light and dark. Zooplankton exhibit photosensitivity that drives their activity, and which likely informed both the evolution of both daily hormonal cycles and vision in more complex animals. Continuing scientific advances have enabled ever more insight into the fundamental role of light (and darkness) in the basic genetic and biochemical mechanisms of life.

Seasonal, Lunar, and Circadian Rhythms

The daily and seasonal rhythms of life on our planet have been long obvious to the primitive peoples of the world. Hunters know when each type o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1 Prediction
• Part 2 Perception
• Part 3 Motivation
• Part 4 Meaning
• Glossary
• List of Illustrations, with Notes
• Notes and References
• Acknowledgments
• Index