Configuration of windows and partition walls of residential apartments to improve daylight condition in dining spaces

Abstract

One of the major concerns of the housing sector is physical and psychological well-being of the users. Poor housing conditions are often connected with an extreme variety of physiological and psychological abnormality. Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, is one of the most densely populated cities in the world. It is confronting an emergency in the housing sector and the resultant is closely built high rise residential apartments on small lands with environmental problems specially lack of daylight. Walk- up apartment buildings are currently an indispensable part of city development because of the change in the urban landownership pattern and splitting of joint family structure. In addition to this, the pattern of the residential spaces and its organization has experienced continuous changes due to rapid urbanization, space constraints and advancement of society. The concept of dining space was evolved historically from rural courtyard that accommodates the maximum daily activities of the occupant. Dining space is the most visually integrated central space in a residential apartment that links the adjacent spaces. Tropical city, such as Dhaka which is blessed with direct daylight, the residential dining spaces are often deprived of daylighting because of its central location in apartment planning and side effect of unplanned urbanization. Windows are in the front line of consideration by architects, lighting experts, photo biologists and psychologists as daylight and view provider. Energy, environment, health; physiological and psychological well- being depend on the configuration and characteristics of windows. Window design in residential setting is more challenging as it embraces different population ranges with a variety of activities. It is essential to optimize window design to enhance the advantage. This research aims to identify the best possible window location and configuration, clerestory configuration and window to wall ratio (WWR) to incorporate daylight into the dining space through the adjacent rooms and peripheral surfaces of the dining space in the context of Dhaka through simulation studies. At first, the literature review was conducted to get the knowledge base, to find window locations and configurations for simulation study and to select the case space. Dynamic annual Climate – Based Daylighting Modelling (CBDM) method was used to evaluate the performances of different location, configuration and WWR considering all weather sky luminance models (i.e. DAYSIM). Finally, the results were combined to find out the most effective window location and configuration, clerestory configuration and WWR for residential dining in the context of Dhaka. Results indicate that, careful positioning of door, window and clerestory in the adjacent rooms of the dining spaces can provide useful daylight in the dining space. Full height corner window along with clerestory on the full length of the peripheral walls of the dining space provides the best illumination level at dining among the studied configurations. Furthermore, window size of 30% of the total façade area of the bed rooms was found to be the most feasible considering the daylighting and glare condition of both bed rooms and the dining. It is expected that the findings of this research will help the architects and the designers to design effective residential apartment façade in terms of daylighting the dining spaces.

Keywords Daylighting, CBDM simulation, Clerestory, Residential apartment buildings, Window location and configuration, WWR.