Arkitema ensures good daylight with OTONOMI

Designing with daylight, for people.

The story starts around a large table, where architects at Arkitema’s office in Oslo are brainstorming various technical and creative ideas for the renovation project of Dronning Ingrids Hage (the Queen Ingrid’s Garden), located in T?yen, Oslo.

→ https://www.arkitema.com/no/prosjekt/dronning-ingrids-hage

The existing build environment is being regenerated into a housing complex for people with demensia, so very naturally the importance of good daylight access is put forward. With age, daylight becomes more important to us humans: our eyes and the overall vision aparatus, which is the most high-tech piece of technology in the known universe, slowly loose in performance.

Openings through the facades and the internal layout of facilities, must then be carefully designed to balance several factors, such as views to the outdoor, thermal comfort, privacy, and daylight.

In the design process, the architect Iselin Thulesius used at first the tool R*lux to assess daylight performances. However, due to the inaccuracies of the tool, she quickly realised it could not be trusted, especially when her intuition told her that two specific rooms should have satisfactory daylight conditions, while the tool said otherwise.

“We used a tool for daylight simulations fitted for early designs, and as we discovered that some of our rooms were in danger of not meeting the standards, we realized we needed something more accurate to ensure our design was good enough.” Iselin Thulesius

To confirm her intuition, she decided to rely on external consultants, and took contact with us to hear about our methods, and opinion.

Only use simulations to confirm an already established conclusion.

I described to her the way we work using www.otonomi.no as a platform for evaluating and communicating daylight in projects. The simple, fast and accurate process was exactly what Iselin needed. She sent us some IFC files that we converted to daylight models, and 48 hours later we were having an online meeting, while looking at the simulated project, with special attention to two rooms, one of which is shown above.

The higher accuracy of the OTONOMI method is two-fold:

• the OTONOMI method rely on the architects’ BIM models to convert the relevant geometry into a daylight model, avoiding time-consuming and error prone manual remodelling.
• The evaluation is made using a vast set of daylight metrics, using local weather data to evaluate the daylight conditions for every daylight hour of the year. Each metrics’ strength and weaknesses are carefully used to properly assess daylight and inform design decisions.

Develop your instinct, and learn to trust it

A well forgotten rule among us engineers is, to only use simulations to confirm an already established conclusion. To many consultants are not applying this rule and solely rely on simulations to give you some data, at best some information. However, to design better buildings we need to elevate ourselves in the wisdom pyramid, and act with knowledge, with wisdom!

So, Iselin and I looked at the simulated model through OTONOMI’s 3d interactive platform, and discussed the daylight conditions looking at several metric:

• DF, daylight factors, with an average of 1.7%, the room doesn’t meet the pre-accepted requirement from the norwegian regulation TEK:

• sDA, Spatial Daylight Autonomy, with a threshold of 100 lux. Here, 82% of the room show daylight levels above 100 lux for more than 50% of the daylight hours. Slightly below the EN:17037 recommendations:

• sDA, with a threshold of 300 lux. Here, 53% of the room show daylight levels above 300 lux for more than 50% of the daylight hours, which is above 50% of the EN:17037 recommendations:

• UDI, Useful Daylight Illuminance, with an average of 54%. The OTONOMI-method we have developed based on the latest research weights the UDI thresholds like in the shown diagram.

The OTONOMI-method classifies room with an UDI above 50% as having satisfactory daylight:

• ASE, Annual Sun Exposure, which shows that 4% of the room receives important sunlight during the year, which give valuable variability in the light:

With this overview and understanding of the room’s function and the general floor layout and daylight conditions, we evaluated the room to have “satisfactory daylight access”, and therefore meets the building code requirements. With proper documentation describing the methods and analysis, Iselin and the rest of the design team at Arkitema coud confirm their intuition, and focus on other aspects of the project.

“The time from the moment we contacted Franz at OTONOMI till we were gathered around a table looking at solutions was short, and since the model they showed us was easy to understand and adjust, we quickly got our answer on what to do to ensure the qualities we needed in our project.” Iselin Thulesius

Are you also interested providing good daylight for your project?

Visit?https://otonomi.no/nb/viewer?for an overview of a typical delivery, and take contact through [email protected]