The average person spends 90 percent of their time indoors, which suggests that the quality of our built environments has significant effects on our overall well-being. Access to daylight and views contribute substantially to the experience of the built environment, influencing cognition, productivity, sleep, and even mood and emotions. Architects have the opportunity and the responsibility to tap into the power of design to positively shape the experience of people and leverage daylight in buildings. When daylighting is prioritized in design, the benefits are many:

• Physiological: A plethora of studies confirm what we intuitively know, that daylight is good for you. Natural light has been found to be superior to artificial light in enabling visual tasks, especially ones that involve fine motor skills and color differentiation. Exposure to daylight is a key factor in regulating sleep and circadian rhythms by regulating melatonin, a hormone that determines a person’s activity and energy levels during the course of a day.
• Biophilic: As we spend more and more time indoors, any opportunity to reconnect with nature becomes more critical. By providing access to daylight in buildings, we promote biophilia, or the innate connection people have to nature and other living things. When paired with natural materials, patterns, colors, and plants, we further strengthen the biophilic effect in a space.
• Mood-Enhancing/Increased Productivity: Access to high-quality daylight has been shown to lessen agitation, improve mood and even ease some pain. Mood changes are likely to affect performance at work and school, suggesting that access to daylight and views directly impacts our ability to perform tasks, retain information, and think creatively. Daylighting has the ability to affect our perception, job satisfaction and, in effect, when used effectively, boost the bottom line.
• Energy-Saving: In addition to all the benefits related to human wellness, strategically utilizing and controlling daylight can reduce reliance on artificial light during the day and save energy.

Early Planning for Daylighting As architects, we seek to optimize daylight from the earliest phases of design by first developing a deep understanding of a project’s needs and leverage building orientation and any site opportunities to maximize daylight. By holding Integrative Workshops, we involve project stakeholders, the design team, consultants, and community members to set a project’s goals and targets. These workshops focus on daylighting and building performance. Together we create a shared vision of success, explore possibilities, and can harness collective intelligence to find solutions. When access to daylight is prioritized, spatial organization, seen through the lens of need-for-light, begins to reorient programmatic adjacencies. Daylighting must always be balanced with building performance. Depending on the building orientation, each façade needs to be carefully considered to provide high MHTN utilizes daylighting analyses, in-house energy modeling, and physical model studies to arrive at the appropriate window-to-wall ratio and develop solar control solutions.