NATURAL LIGHT IN CONSTRUCTION OF LIFE SPACE: PERCEPTION AND COMFORT

Natural light, as everyone knows, plays a fundamental role within the anthropized environment and mainly indoor, both for the comfort feelings it succeeds to satisfy, and regarding the number of complex perception phenomena which here develop, due exactly to the day source coming from the sun. The subject “light” for the present issue of the magazine is aimed at defining which choices – of materials, shape, typologies, urban context – will be the most suitable for optimizing the maximum exploitation of natural light, for both the real comfort and perception of objects, built as well as natural. Light is in fact established as one of the ecological factors which are fundamental for life, as well as for growth and evolution of biotic systems: but it is also an efficient means for more complex ecosystemically interactions. Nonetheless from recent studies on sustainability, the light contribution within the “green” strategies is often neglected, and only in few cases social aspects are examined in depth. In fact the visual comfort performance – for the user “man” of any kind of edified structures or infrastructures – should be guaranteed beyond the minimum threshold, so in the buildings as in more complex structures, and this in addition to the already existing regulations’ prescription, which can control the efficiency of the comfort itself. Many are in fact the parameters and the aspects to be inspected during the knowledge of the interactions – this time anthropized – between natural light coming from the sky, under the shape of the radiant energy of the discreet units of Photons, and the human world through its buildings. Under the viewpoint of the Ecology, light – as well as water – can be considered both as a resource, for it is consumed by biotic systems’ population, and as a conditions, for it affected the organisms’ capacity of employing resources, also nutrients. In particular it is a resource for the plants’ photosynthesis, and a condition fundamental for the circadian rhythms.² Nonetheless in our anthropized sphere natural light plays a more complex role, for human beings run a number of additional activities, differently from the elementary ones of the other creatures on Earth (nutrition, reproduction and growth), those that require peculiar levels of Illumination; light in fact so much favours human beings’ life that they invented a surrogate, the artificial light, at the beginning by employing the fire, which very soon they would learn to produce themselves, and then adopting technologies more and more evolved and efficient, as well as finally even very much cheaper from the primary resource-saving viewpoint (for example the LED3³). Coming back now to focus on natural light, it is useful to underline the role that it plays in human life, in running the number of very fine working and enjoyment tasks which require a peculiar use of it and which act mainly in confined rooms. Last but not least the tool “light” aimed at vision is essential for every living being. “In the vision we attend to the wonderful transformation of electromagnetic waves of Photons into light and colour sensations”.⁴