Daylighting interventions in line with the biological clock

RODRIGUEZ, ROBERTO GERMÁN; PATTINI, ANDREA

Colonia de Sacramento

Simposio; XV Latin American Symposium on Chronobiology - LASC 2019; 2019

FUNDACIBA. Fundación para el Desarrollo de las Ciencias Básicas

Nowadays, natural light in the built environment has taken a positive value from several aspects including energy savings, reduction of environmental impacts, and people?s performance and wellbeing: Experts from the fields of design and architecture are re-discovering daylighting. To seize the full potential of natural light as a source of indoor lighting, our built environment must meet specific daylighting criteria and follow design strategies in order to have the desired positive impacts, especially in Buildings with high indoor light value requirements (e.g. non-residential buildings for daytime use). On the other hand, the hours of use of these spaces are determined on the basis of the official time, uses and customs (e.g. in scholar buildings, the school calendar is set by the government every year). Then, a conflict may appear between official time, solar time -which may worsen if a period of daylight saving time is established- leading to unwanted impacts in terms of energy use, and human performance. In our Research Institute we analyse sunlight availability (measurement of light and solar radiation), its impact as a habitat illuminant (daylighting design strategies and solar control) and the interaction of this stimulus with people (visual and non visual effects) integrating technological aspects of natural light with human factors (comfort, safety, performance, chronobiology). In this sense open the discussion to redefine the correlation between the official time and solar time that the countries establish, as a basic aspect for the adjustment of the diurnal activities in the habitat with the biological clock.