Daylight

Light plays an important role in the valuation of architectural elements, and it is a factor in designing spaces. Elements have no visual identity without light. This paper is intended to analyze the lighting in the vault of Shahrak-e-Gharb Jame Mosque with an emphasis on the role of daylight in order to find out how the designer has viewed the use of daylight in designing this mosque. The main ques tion of this research is, “what is the role of natural daylight within the vault of Shahrak-e-Gharb Jame Mosque?”. For this purpose, the light intensity was measured in the Shabes tan and the vault of the mosque as an architectural monument using photometric ins truments. Then, the trajectory of natural light was simulated using DIALux during a whole year, and the results were analyzed indicating that the role of natural light as an identity element in exhibiting the luminance of the mihrab has been neglected, and the light intensity seems uniform and boring within the vault. 

Various researches have introduced methods to use daylight in office buildings in the Middle Eas t zone, but none of them have ever considered the use of plant leaf arrangement, called phyllotaxis, as a comprehensive solution for harves ting daylight. The idea of the Phyllotaxis Tower has been raised for several years but the main ques tion of this research is whether using the phyllotaxis model is capable of exploiting daylight in high-rise buildings or not. So, in response to this ques tion, the main aim of the research was set to evaluate daylight efficiency in high-rise office buildings by presenting an exemplary and phyllotaxis-inspired design. The research method is encompassed several s teps including, s tudying the literature on the subject firs tly, then modeling a prototype building based on the Biomimicry Problem-Based approach, and eventually computer simulation to evaluate the performance of the proposed building. The results show that office units can get daylight illuminance of 500 lux at 50% of operating time per year in addition to proper performance on four single days of different seasons of the year. Furthermore, the sample building obtained label B of energy consumption from S tandard No. 14254 presented by the Ins titute of S tandards and Indus trial Research of Iran, which has been compared with the energy label of 45 office buildings in the same location and same climate conditions, based on the figures are defined on the aforementioned s tandard and has the bes t performance among them.