The influence of the urban environment on the availability of daylighting in office buildings in Israel

The main goals of the present work are to investigate the influences of the built environment on the potential use of daylighting in office buildings in Israel, and to offer a simple design method for architects during initial design stages to assess the daylighting potential of the building site. A typical office building under different surrounding built layouts has been modeled and simulated using Sustarc and Radiance. Parametric simulations have been performed to estimate the influence of different obstruction patterns on the daylighting performance of the office. The availability of daylighting has been shown to be approximately proportional to the sky solid angle (SSA) subtended from the center of the window. The proposed methodology can help designers evaluate and understand the possibilities of using natural lighting from the early conceptual design stages when different design alternatives are being considered as well as adapt the building design for the existing surrounding conditions. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.