Farmani Group assembled BLT Buil Design Awards as one of the most comprehensive Award programs in the Architecture and Building fields regrouping: Architecture, Interior Design, Construction Product and Project Management.
BLT Built Design Awards is the sibling Award of International Design Awards (IDA), DNA Paris, Architecture MasterPrize all focusing on Architecture and Interior Design.
The Farmani Group, established in 1985, is responsible for many successful awards around the globe. Farmani Group organizes the International Design Awards (IDA), Architecture Masterprize (AMP) DNA, Paris Design Awards, London International Creative Awards (LICC), Prix de la Photographie in Paris (PX3), and the Annual Lucie Awards for Photography, which has emerged as one of the world’s most prestigious awards. Learn more about Farmani Group here.
Lighting, in general, has a profound effect in spaces, invoking emotions to its spectators and helping architecture and interior design achieve its true purpose.
For the external lighting of heritage buildings, illumination aims for a lasting impression from its viewers. In night illumination as well as daylight, lighting highlights the architectural aspects of the structure, exposing details through casting light and shadow. This dramatic play of lights will need strategic lighting engineering and architectural design solutions.
Night illumination in Heritage Buildings
Outdoors require less light intensity compared to indoors, emphasizing a theatrical appeal, and less focused on task illumination.
Before designing, considerations should be kept in mind. These involve aesthetics, mood lighting, technical, economic, and conservation aspects. UNESCO guidelines and recommendations should also be put into an account.
UNESCO Guidelines and Concerns
UNESCO recommends that monuments should not be illuminated from the bottom up except for historic buildings. Lights should be intercepted by the building façade to prevent light from straying away. Use luminous flux reducers that have an automated or self-timing mechanism that can switch off automatically during the day.
Lighting intensities and mechanisms should be studied as not to disrupt biodiversity and nightscape, especially in natural and rural areas.
Other smart lighting solutions are intelligent lighting systems, adaptive lighting, wireless sensor fusion, and smart solar-powered LED lighting systems.
To achieve aesthetically-pleasing lighting, luminaires equipped with white light sources such as metal halide, compact fluorescent, or LED is recommended. These luminaires have excellent color rendering properties that allow the color to be seen naturally, setting a more comfortable visual environment. During the night our eye adapts to the sensitive blue end spectrum, which means we see better with white light sources.
At night, eye sensitivity changes to the ‘dark-adapted eye,’ which is more sensitive to the blue end of the spectrum, meaning we can see better under white light sources.
Temperature sets an ambiance and impressions, 3000K temperature level is warm and creates a softer and comfortable setting, while the 4200K has a cooler temperature level, provides a crisper atmosphere.
Keeping the running costs down is one of the major concerns of the museum and heritage sectors. Most tungsten-halogen lighting is now replaced with LED lights to save on energy and replacement costs.
With technology and its efficient performance and long life span, provide consistent lighting effects and minimal maintenance worries.
As concerns in the effects of night illumination to surrounding nature, it is recommended to use flat-glass light distributions. This eliminates direct upward lighting, a major contributor to sky glow. Minimal column heights to reduce light over spilling.
Reflection, glare, and unwanted light can also be caused by the luminaire finish, positioning, and fixing methods during the daytime. Proper planning and design are needed to provide visual comfort from viewers and the surrounding nature.
Landscape and surrounding elements can also be utilized to mitigate the negative effects of night illumination. Plant trees on the site that can screen off and block away unwanted light to the surrounding environment.
One type of pollution we don’t hear often is light pollution, which has a damaging effect on the environment, especially for migratory birds and even insects.
To minimize the damaging effect of excessive lighting, there must be a collaborative effort to switch to advanced lighting technologies that are designed for efficiency and reducing light pollution. Applying this type of technology to heritage sites allows public visibility for heritage sites in the evening by practicing proper planning on how to light up a site in such a way that it can attract visitors.
All the while, proper design, and implementation must ensure that these new lighting technologies will not have much of an impact on the site in terms of aesthetics. By only installing the necessary number of light fixtures, in the right areas, energy savings are achieved. Thankfully, such advanced luminaires exist today.
Building a home with sustainability in mind offers an array of benefits that primarily covers environmental responsibility and our overall wellness.
Firstly, what is a sustainable building? According to a HAC (Housing Assistance Council) Report by Mark Kudlowitz, creating a sustainable building is a process wherein houses, buildings, and auxiliary infrastructures are built to reduce resource consumption, decrease environmental impacts, and creating a healthier living environment.
Therefore, sustainable housing entails sustainable building methodologies, materials, and operation. For an effective and impactful eco-friendly home, the structure should have integrated sustainable concepts early on from the planning stage.
Key Elements of Sustainable Housing
Approaches of Sustainable Housing
Site Planning and Design
Sustainability should start during the inception of your planning process so it is easier to oversee concerns and provide solutions while your house plan is still on paper. This reduces risks in the building construction process itself and unnecessary expenses.
When planning to build your home, select a location where it is near to amenities, and have access to sidewalks and roadways. It also helps if you have a site that was previously owned or that it is within an urban neighborhood. This reduces disturbances and less impact on the environment such as native landscaping and light pollution.
Reduce heat absorption and increase natural ventilation and daylighting through the building’s thermal mass. Houses with excellent orientation and thermal massing can reduce the need for air conditioning and artificial lighting, maintaining a comfortable internal environment.
Materials and Building Systems:
During the planning stage, sustainable materials and building systems should already be considered. When an architect draws up the plans enhancing energy efficiency, such as using natural insulation products, specifying LED lights, bamboo paneling, and locally sourced materials contribute to a sustainable project.
During Construction:
When talking about sustainable houses, we seldom think of the construction process, and yet a large contributor of waste and energy usage is from the building process itself.
For a smaller project such as a residential home, the concept can be similarly applied. Provide segregation bins that can be collected by local or community waste management facilities. Where daily housekeeping on the part of the contractor should be implemented on-site.
Sustainability is not just a trend but a need for all types of building occupations. Commercial and industrial sectors have also responded positively to making sustainable efforts on their products and built-environments. As sustainable housing has increased over the years, more affordable and efficient design solutions are now being implemented. These sustainable efforts will surely pave to way to continue in the coming years.
An architect’s craft is more than just creating built environments, instead, these built spaces of interaction are venues for communication and inception of new ideas. Architecture has a great impact on how its occupants live and think. At the same time, a designed space affects its surroundings and the whole community as well.
Public spaces, places of commerce, transportation, and even our humble abodes influence people in the way they live, perceive and think. Built spaces are about people and by their people.
When people are put together, they can behave in many surprising ways. When placed in a space, people will tend to communicate and collaborate just as when observing people in a crowd. While designed spaces can never fully control people, they can encourage or discourage movement and behavior. The unpredictability of human interaction makes designing social spaces the most challenging work an architect can partake.
Architecture is known as the marriage of art and science, and, arguably an embodiment of different fields in humanities and social sciences.
Beginnings
The role of built spaces as an interactive space can be seen at the very onset of human civilizations. In 2011, a review by Wil Roebroeks and Paola Villa state that fire is used in Europe around 400,000 years ago as ancient humans expanded into colder climates. For the cave dwellers, they gather around a firepit were eating, sleeping, making tools and, other daily activities take place.
Roman and Greek architecture are great examples of how architecture influences people in their interactions with society. Thermae, stoa, temples, and theaters are a few examples of communal spaces during ancient times.
Architecture and Social Interactions:
A Common Ground for the diverse building that is intended for public use can be a common ground for people with different philosophies or cultures to come together and express openly. It is a stage where people can openly express, work, and share ideas comfortably.
Public parks, for instance, are designed with the community in mind. Amenities such as picnic grounds, bike lanes, and cycling create activities that individuals and families can enjoy.
This is key to building vibrant neighborhoods and lively communities. With a community space where shops, groceries, residences, and others that bring different families together to a single communal space. A neighborhood with multiple nodes of destinations create a layered multiplicity of experiences. This structure fosters connection and communication while creating culture from the daily routines that interplays within the community.
As architecture values human experiences, it creates spaces where social connections are created among different cultures. Museums, galleries, and monuments can provide a glimpse if not tell stories of the past for generations to see.
Architecture educates us making us closer and understanding of different philosophies and cultures.
Probably the best example of how a place creates a new culture is our learning environments. Where a school houses students with different backgrounds congregate and build new social circles and networks.
Let’s not forget that architecture brings families together. Homes are designed in the context of their owners’ preferences and their ways of living. The residential building is the perfect example of how architecture can bring a balance between aesthetics and function. With a common space that both serves individual and communal needs of the family.
With the advent of technology, the concept of space may obscure as traditional social interactions through physical spaces are challenged by online and remote communication. But as social beings, our sense of belongingness and need for social connections to a personal level is still innate within us. And, there’s a sense of authenticity and deeper connection when it comes to the traditional social interaction compared to the online version.
As a conceived design can either unite or isolate us, the architecture will definitely stay as a powerful force that the society will have in the many years to come.
The interplay of natural lights in an interior space creates mood, enhances materials, and energizes a place. It is indeed a design element like no other.
Indoor places with beautiful plays of light create an alluring ambiance and ensues a lively feeling to its occupants. This correlation of positivity and natural light has been a fascination for both the architecture and the scientific field. Evidence of this undeniable connection is seen in case studies of places on hospice, work, education, and even our humble abode love the natural lighting.
How Natural Lighting Keeps Us Healthy?
We’ve provided a list of major reasons how daylight can affect our health:
But why does natural light keep us healthy? Aside from helping us to get healthy doses of Vitamin D, natural light syncs on our Circadian rhythm, our built-in body clock. Designing workplaces, for instance, require natural light and ventilation to seep through the workspaces. Without the glare and unwanted heat, a properly designed work area with the consideration of natural lighting creates a lively and inspiring space for employees.
Natural light is one design consideration when preventing the negative effects of Sick Building Syndrome. SBS is where workers experience headaches and respiratory problems, which are contributed by poor ventilation and working conditions. Though SBS mainly focuses on natural ventilation, studies show that natural lighting can help in preventing Sick Building Syndrome in buildings.
There’s a reason why kitchens are best oriented on the east and west directions. For most places, the east area is the perfect spot for your breakfast nook as well as the kitchen area because you get the healthy sunlight while keeping it cool during the afternoon sun. Kitchens can also be placed along the west side, where it is the hottest spot during the afternoon, provided that you have a longer roof overhang to prevent glare and heat build-up.
When kitchens are oriented on the hottest areas, it prevents mold and mildew build-up. Bathrooms and other damp spaces should also have ample daylighting as it serves as it kills bacteria and fungi naturally.
Like other benefits of sunlight, science backs up how the natural light improves our mood and kicks off the so-called winter blues. According to an Australian study, serotonin (known as happy chemicals) levels are higher during sunny days compared to cloudy ones. Serotonin not only stabilizes your mood, but it also helps to heal wounds, stimulate nausea, and maintain bone health.
The brain dedicates more space to our visual senses compared to all other senses combined. As our visual perception signals our memory and decisions, it also affects our emotions that can affect our state of wellbeing.
Light can bring out the rich color and texture of materials better than artificial lights. With visually stimulating views, we feel relaxed and optimistic, which can greatly improve our overall wellbeing.
Probably the most obvious benefit of sunlight is that it provides energy and warmth to our bodies. Not only on its physical form, but natural light can also bring a sense of warmness or coziness in an interior. Understandably a room with light seeping through windows is more inviting and creates a sense of liveliness than a dark room.
For many years we simulate natural light in our architectural elements such as white painted walls and ceilings or luminaires with different color tones. We also allow natural light through our windows, skylights, light tubes, and clerestories to reach the nooks and corners of our interior spaces. Indeed, natural light has a great impact on our daily lives, and we continue to plan, assemble, and create spaces that can capture the benefits of the free but depleting energy source.
