2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This article presents an overview of the daylighting laboratory constructed in 2006 through a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant obtained by the second author at the --- and its contribution to educating architects and engineers. Due to the increased need to reduce energy costs associated with artificial lighting, coupled with health benefits from natural light, the use of the daylighting lab has now become much more relevant. The daylighting laboratory is used by both architecture and architectural engineering undergraduate students as part of the “integrative design studio”, which is usually taught by 5 to 6 faculty members at the --- including the second author. This typically includes students testing scaled building models in the daylighting lab, to improve their initial design by admitting enough daylight and achieve uniform distribution of light as possible. To further understand the impact of the daylighting laboratory on faculty and student education, the authors conducted three separate surveys, consisting of multiple-choice questions and an open-ended question. Separate surveys were sent to current students, and alumni of --- who have previously used the facility as part of the studio. In addition, another survey was sent to the 6 current faculty members involved in teaching the ‘integrative design studio’, and 2 retired faculty of --- who have previously taught the studio but are currently not involved in teaching this course anymore. Results show that a majority of current and former students feel that they have gained extensive knowledge on daylighting by testing their models in the laboratory, which turned out to be useful in practice. Both students and faculty strongly felt the need to allow other departments within ---, such as Physics and Mechanical Engineering to utilize the laboratory for graduate research, since the current use of the facility is restricted to undergraduate education within the ---. Based on the survey results, future work is underway to enable students from other areas within --- to access the daylighting lab for research, besides incorporating collaborative work with design firms involved in daylighting design. Given the recent interest in daylighting and its association with occupant comfort, it is expected that this facility will assist in educating architects and engineers on this topic, enabling them to contribute to the industry and the building science community at large.