Daylighting design process for visual comfort and energy efficiency for a signature building

Abstract

Human comfort is the most important priority in designing living environments. Achieving thermal comfort, visual comfort, effective operation of a building along with innovative energy efficiency measures require extensive involvement of engineers and architectures in tandem for the future high-performance buildings. In this paper, we focus on design of the daylighting aspects of a complicated building and present a methodology. The concept here is based on the interactions of several stakeholders including the project owner, the project architect, structural engineers, façade engineers, mechanical engineers, lighting designers and electric engineers, who are involved in extensive discussions towards the design and construction of a complicated building in a iniversity campus. Simulations are carried out using different architectural and computational techniques including DesignBuilder and Revit. The project constraints set by the stakeholder preferences are resolved with other engineering methodologies. This interactive process allowed a very favourable design of daylighting in the building. In this paper, the steps are discussed and the methodology is outlined.