Fenestration and Debauchery

A visualization of Continuous Daylight Autonomy (cDA)

As an (electrical) lighting designer, daylighting is exciting to me for a lot of reasons.  There are energy conservation reasons, of course–40% of the electricity consumption in commercial spaces is lighting, and daylight harvesting is a mostly untapped method of reducing that sum.  There is evidence that a connection to the outside world is beneficial to the happiness and productivity of the occupants, such as the research conducted by the Heschong Mahone Group on classrooms and commercial office spaces.  And, artistically, there’s a tremendous potential to create dynamic sculptures using the sun and building form, and to contribute to the narrative of the architecture.

I just got back from attending the Daylighting Institute at the 2012 Lightfair, which if you have a chance to go is really worth your time.  As the LEED sustainable building program becomes the default for high-profile projects, it is pushing daylighting design from the provenance of academic research and a few specialty firms out into the mainstream of standard architectural practice.

Many of the seminars this year revolved around the various daylighting metrics available, whether moment-in-time based metrics such as that found in LEED 2.2, to dynamic metrics such as daylight autonomy (DA), useful daylight illuminace (UDI), and spatial daylight autonomy (sDA).  I thought a quick reference guide to the various ways of measuring daylight within the space, with examples, might come in handy for people like myself that are trying to get a handle on all this.  The metrics are in approximate order of how established they are within the design community, with metrics that are still under active development like Spatial Daylight Autonomy towards the end.  I’ve also created a generic example space to help explain the concepts.

The example space, rendered in AGI

Continue reading

Here are some pictures from a production of Fool for Love that I designed with Boxcar Theater Company.  What’s notable about this production is that I made all of the lighting fixtures.  As a site-specific piece, we didn’t want to introduce anything into the performance space that didn’t belong there, such as theatrical lighting equipment.  So I modified practical lighting fixtures to work for theatrical purposes.  The result was a performance that was truly without a proscenium frame, more raw and intimate than theater, even good theater, is usually.  Additional pictures after the break.

Continue reading

I am getting to be alright at this WordPress stuff: I’ve just completed a redesign of www.wingedvictorydesign.com, which is my theatrical lighting design portfolio.  It’s the same content (for now, I have some new shows to put up there as well), but the pictures are larger and the layout is much nicer.
I’m also working on getting my architectural lighting design stuff up on the web, that will happen soon-ish.  In the meantime, if there’s anything you find seems broken or hard to use, do drop me a line!

Click to enlarge.

Here is something you can do on Friday:  Now playing at the Hyde Street Studios with Boxcar Theater company, True West by Sam Shepard.  This is the first of two plays I’m designing with Boxcar Theater company, and it’s a great show, and I’m very happy with the design.  I’ll do a writeup for it on my portfolio site.

True West runs through April 7 and I hope you can make it.  More information here.

So Many Thingssssss: I’ve been so busy working on projects that I haven’t had time to write about them!  Here is some of what I’ve been up to for the last few months.

So my dad is a classic car enthusiast, and he has a ’63 Lincoln slabside and a ’56 Lincoln Mark II. It’s not really germane to this post, but let’s have a picture of that, shall we?

So anyway, he edits the newsletter for the club he’s in, the many-syllabled Lincoln Continental Owner’s Club, Texas Gulf Coast Region.  As people his age go, he’s fairly computer savvy, but not really a desktop publishing guy, so his method of publication has been to assemble the stories in Word, and then create a PDF from that with links to flickr albums and email that to everyone in the club.  It’s a functional solution, but I thought an upgrade was in order, so for Christmas I built him a blog of his very own, now up at www.thecontinentalstar.com

If you want to stop by, there are lots of pictures from prior events, as well as listings of cars for sale, directions to the next meet, etc. etc. etc.

In my prior post about daylighting analysis, I focused on a ‘representative points’ approach, i.e. taking as typical a mid-morning and mid-afternoon time on the vernal equinox, along with perhaps some bounding points on the winter and summer solstice, and extrapolate the quantity and quality of natural light from there.  I was interested to know if a more granular approach would confirm the validity of this method, and what other useful information it might yield besides.

I set the computer up to run a calculation for every 30 minutes, on thirty day intervals throughout the year, for CIE Cloudy, Partly Cloudy, and Clear skies.   That made for some 600 radiosity calculations in all, so after queuing all that up, I let my desktop run for about two weeks straight. Continue reading

I found some planks that had been discarded on O’Farrell street (picture here), and decided to make a cutting board from them.  I’ve only got about 2′ x 3′ of counter area in my comically tiny San Francisco apartment anyway, so I’m essentially replacing all of the counter space.  That suits me because I feel like cutting boards are kind of a sub-optimal solution, in that you’d ideally want the entire workspace to be a cutting area.

My original idea for this was that I was going to stain specific pieces in a semi-random pattern as in this pre-visualization rendering I did:
Continue reading

I went to a lecture by Galen Burrell of Arup, on climate-based daylighting design.  One graphic that I particularly liked was the above, showing total energy usage vs. daylight penetration.  As you add more windows, you need less electric lighting, but you also have more thermal gain resulting in higher HVAC loads.  So daylighting design boils down to an optimization problem, finding the saddle point between those two curves.  Neat!

These are some quick reference guides I made for my dad, for Christmas.  I am posting it now because June is the next month after December, clearly.  So my dad has been hampered in working on his classic cars and rental properties with their myriad electrical problems because he’s never been exposed to the fundamentals of electricity.  I figured that what he needed in lieu of a formal physics course was a quick reference that he could refer to as needed. Continue reading

South exposure glazing at 3pm, noon, and 9am.

Prologue: I have been wanting for  to better educate myself on daylighting design and analysis, and its coordination with traditional lighting design.  Here in California, we have one of the most aggressive energy efficiency codes in the country, Title 24.  While this and voluntary measures such as LEED have driven impressive technological advancements in smart, lean building, we’re now a point of diminishing returns because, quite simply, most of the low-hanging fruit is gone.  With emerging technologies such as LED lighting still less efficient than good fluorescent lighting (and at three times the cost), there’s no source-efficiency cavalry around the corner. Continue reading