| Daylighting - The Foundation of a Sustainable School |
| Written by Green Building Pro Staff |
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Broadcast Date: Wednesday, August 25, 2010 Speaker: Daylighting is the foundation of a sustainable school. This practice, which admits the controlled light of the sun and sky into occupied spaces and supplements with appropriate electrical illumination, can save up to 60% of the typical school electricity bill. Daylighting has also been shown to improve the learning environment and contribute to higher student test scores and satisfaction on the part of both students and teachers. When incorporated in integrated design strategies it adds very little incremental cost. The top strategies for designing daylighting include proper orientation and shading of openings, lighting surfaces in rooms to reduce glare requirements for high concentrations of electric fill light, and coordination of electric lighting design. In addition to the daylighting strategy itself, integration of openings into ventilation and building envelope decisions as well as reduction in the waste heat of electric lighting can contribute to additional energy savings. Given that schools are predominantly daytime uses, daylighting is the natural place to start a sustainable design.
Lisa Gelfand, Founder and Principal of Gelfand Partners Architects Lisa Gelfand, AIA, LEED AP, is founding and managing principal of Gelfand Partners Architects in San Francisco, and a principal of Roesling Nakamura Terada Architects in San Diego. Both practices are leaders in sustainable, energy-efficient design, community centers, affordable and special needs housing, educational facilities, and commercial projects. At Gelfand Partners, Ms. Gelfand has designed or supervised the design of over 34 education projects, as well as over 2500 units of affordable housing created primarily through the sustainable adaptive reuse of existing or historic buildings. Ms. Gelfand is an innovator in education and affordable housing. She was the architect of one of the first Hope VI family public housing replacements in the country, 193 unit Yerba Buena Plaza East in San Francisco, and was the architect for the Collaborative for High Performance Schools (CHPS) demonstration project, Georgina Blach Intermediate School, in Los Altos. She has completed four more CHPS schools and serves on the CHPS Technical Committee and the Green Committee of the California DSA Advisory Board. Her projects have earned numerous international, national, state, and local design awards. Ms. Gelfand is the principal author of Sustainable School Architecture, Wiley and Sons, 2010, and is currently preparing a second book for Wiley to be titled Sustainable Renovation. She has practiced in New York and Utah and has also held faculty appointments in architecture and/or landscape architecture in New Zealand, at the University of California at Davis and the University of Utah. She regularly lectures and publishes in a variety of academic and professional settings. She received her M.Arch. from Yale School of Architecture in 1978. |
