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This book examines the many ways that our lives are enriched by the presence of natural daylight illumination and window views within our buildings. It is written to engage and challenge a variety of readers, including all forms of building and urban designers, plus anyone interested in human health and wellbeing.
List of contents
Introduction Part 1: Prediction 1. Planetary Rhythms 2. Chronobiology and Human Health 3. The Evolving and Aging Eye 4. The Predictive Brain 5. Attention and Insight Part 2: Perception 6. Learning to See 7. Patterns of Daylight Illumination 8. Designing with Daylight 9. Elements of View Part 3: Motivation 10. Daylighting Education 11. Selling Daylight 12. Enduring Urban Forms 13. The Value of View 14. Working with Daylight 15. Healing Daylight Part 4: Meaning 16. Iconic Daylight and Views 17. Visions of Nature 18. Biophilia and Technophilia 19. Synthesis and Next Steps Conclusion Glossary List of Illustrations Notes and References Index Acknowledgements About the Author
About the author
Lisa Heschong is an architect and founding principal of the Heschong Mahone Group (HMG), a building sciences consulting firm, where she led groundbreaking research showing a relationship between daylight and student test scores, retail sales, and office worker performance. Heschong is the author of the classic Thermal Delight in Architecture, along with many technical publications about daylighting and energy effi ciency in buildings. A graduate of UC Berkeley and MIT, she is a Fellow of the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES), and received the ARCC 2012 Haecker Award for Architectural Research. Heschong lives in Santa Cruz, California, with her husband, two horses, and a sailboat, where she never tires of watching the changing colors of the surrounding ocean and sky.
Summary
This book examines the many ways that our lives are enriched by the presence of natural daylight illumination and window views within our buildings. It is written to engage and challenge a variety of readers, including all forms of building and urban designers, plus anyone interested in human health and wellbeing.
Additional text
"We need this book now more than ever because we spend more time indoors now than at any point in human history. With Visual Delight in Architecture, Heschong redirects our gaze and reimagines what it means to create truly humane indoor environments. Every person desires a view to the outdoors to satiate their appetite for light. This is a fundamental human need and its provision should be a basic human right…"
Kevin Van Den Wymelenberg, PhD, Director, Institute for Health in the Built Environment; Professor of Architecture, University of Oregon
"Architects, and anyone, interested in creating a more humanitarian world need to read this book, immediately! As the preeminent architect who demonstrated how daylit buildings can improve learning, working and selling, Lisa Heschong brings us up to date with added attention to views. Skillfully synthesizing research, literature, and design imperatives, Heschong summarizes why both daylight and views are needed in our buildings to better serve all building occupants, our society, and the future of the planet."
Margo Jones, FAIA, NCARB, LEED-AP, Founding Partner, Jones Whitsett Architects, Massachusetts
"There is so much more to Visual Delight in Architecture than seeing – from rhythm to health to cognition to community to beauty to survival – Lisa Heschong brings another brilliant treatise to life, for all of us who design and inhabit architecture."
Vivian Loftness, FAIA, Paul Mellon Chairholder and University Professor in Architecture, Carnegie Mellon University
"Now, three generations after my architect father Richard Neutra started to write pleas for researched responsible design, architect and researcher Lisa Heschong is showing us how far we have come and how far we have to go in understanding the deep biological impact of what reaches us through our eyes."
Dr. Raymond Neutra, Epidemiologist, Past President of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology, Chair of the Richard Neutra Foundation, Past (Associate and Assistant) Professor of Public Health, UCLA and Harvard University
