Time Schedule:
Joel E. Loveland
ARCH 535
Seattle Campus
Focus on individual student projects involving research and design for lighting.
Class description
The Seminar
What is this civilizing light of nature? How do we render a space civilized with such a powerfully petulant element of nature?
There has been a long romantic relationship between architects and light. Harrison’s accounts from Forests, Shadow of Civilization describe a several millennia-old western mythical role of the need for this civilizing enlightenment. This Autumn’s course work in advanced lighting will explore the physical and cultural role of daylight, and the limits of architecture in controlling natural light.
We will study precedents of building that advertently and inadvertently create spaces filled with the “civilizing” light. We will explore this civilizing light of nature by building the civic walls, and testing the appearance of light from the skylights above.
We will ask ourselves, how has modern architecture replaced the civic natural “light of the real” with the appearance of daylight, the artificial light of electricity; how does this appearance of light affect our sense of place; and how can the ecology of light influence our perception of self.
Coursework Taught by Joel Loveland and Christopher Meek, the course will consist of seminar presentations, discussions of readings and presented materials, and a weekly experimental exercise, begun out of class, completed in class. The course, meeting twice a week for 90 minutes, will consist of Seminar Mondays, with presentations and discussion of the ideas of the course, and Lab or Fieldtrip Fridays focusing on experiencing and experimenting with weekly seminar topics. The monday seminars will introduce daylight in architecture, develop strategies for daylighting and explore analogue and digital methods of assessing the robustness of your daylighting design decisions in terms of quality lighting and energy efficiency.
This is a required course in the University of Washington’s Architectural Lighting Certificate Program.
Student learning goals
General method of instruction
Seminars, field examinations of daylighting, experiments in the daylighting lab.
Recommended preparation
Completion of Architecure 435, Introduction to Architectural Lighting, or a similar course where fundamentals of lighting vocabulary, analysis and design techniques are introduced
Class assignments and grading
Out-of-class explorations of the nature of daylight and the daylighting of buildings. The final project requires the development of a daylighting aspect to a current project under design.
Quality of the completion of weekly exercises and the final project
