Interior Partitioned Layout and Daylighting Energy Performance in Office Buildings

In this age of "Information", many people consider it a deterrent to information flow to provide a hierarchy with private rooms in a modern office layout. There are others, however, who insist that visual and acoustical privacy are more important than any other design factor in achieving higher productivity. The debate may never end, but the partitioned open plan, which is a new form of the vast open plan, has merits of each concept - open and closed layout. Consequently, office design has dramatically shifted to partitioned open planning, with shorter, temporary walls or partitions, originally intended for increasing privacy and diminishing hierarchy, yet still keeping flexibility in spatial organization. The introduction of low-level partitioned spaces in an office layout, however, produces a complicated lighting design problem. Obviously, accurately predicted daylighting performance data are needed not only for daylighting design but for artificial lighting system design. Scale models of 12 sets of unit partitioned spaces are constructed and extensive scale model measurements of both daylight and reflected sunlight have been performed within an artificial sky simulator. The prototype-building interior is modeled with different partition configurations, each of which is modeled using the different envelope geometry and exterior configurations, and then the variations in interior light levels are estimated. The result indicates that partitioned spaces employed in an open plan of modern offices still offer a large potential for daylighting and energy saving as well. Much of the savings may derive from the cumulative effect of reflected sunlight. Optimal design for building envelope geometry and exterior configuration promises additional savings.