Literature Review on Daylighting & Office Building Design 1

Benefits of Daylight

Many previous researches have proven that daylight is beneficial not only for energy saving, but also visual comfort as well as psychological needs (Robbins, 1986; Hamdan, 1996; Dubois, 2001a;Zain-Ahmed et al., 2002b; Chou, 2004; Carmody, et al., 2004; Mohd. Zin et al. According to Robbins (1986), 30 - 50% of energy used in a commercial building is to illuminate the interior spaces. Daylight can reduce the dependency on electrical lighting. Daylight is more efficient at providing light in comparison to electric lighting and producing less heat for the same amount of light. Zain-Ahmed et al. (2002a) stated that savings of a maximum of 10% can be achieved by using daylighting strategies alone. Moreover, Athienitis and Tzempelikos (2002) claimed that the daylight benefits in term of increased productivity and reduced absenteeism of office workers probably surpass the significant energy savings.

According to Robbins (1986), the benefits of daylight can be summarized as:-
• Quality of Light
• Importance of daylight as a design element
• View
• Use of daylight apertures as fire exits in emergencies
• Energy conservation
• Energy consumption and peak demand cost savings resulting from the use of daylight
• No cost change in construction
• Opportunity to develop integrated structural and mechanical systems
• Psychological and physiological benefits not obtainable with electric lighting or windowless buildings
• The genuine desire to have natural light in a room or space.