Justin Brown and Dan Weissman presented project case studies and some quality futurizing at this year’s bi-annual IES Research Symposium, Light + Intelligence, in Orlando, FL.

In Session 1, Weissman presented “Heliotropic shading: Daylighting a Rare Books Reading Room with Electrochromic Glass, Parametric Analysis and Design Intervention.

A Case Study of the design process for a dynamic, environment-adapting facade, where simulation data becomes the control data. This project presented an opportunity to execute a fundamentally new and unique method for solar control that is perfectly tuned to its locale and adapted to the architecture. The patterns created are a constantly evolving expression of the exact daylight control needed at each moment.”

In Session 2, Brown and Weissman presented “Lighting in the Age of the Metaverse“

Architecture is reliant upon light to give it form, to allow us to understand its nuances, spatial qualities, and material conditions. However, lighting designers have historically relied on “calcs” to verify design decisions, which created a feedback loop wherein mathematical (and now digital) modeling tools consistently led practitioners to generic solutions that rely on the uniformity of light at the task plane, without a robust method of assessing the impacts of the luminous environment in three dimensions. Over the past three decades, tools for lighting visualization have become more robust and sophisticated, such that at this point we have arguably plateaued, working successfully with advanced physically-based, photometrically accurate, rendering software to visualize design solutions practically in real-time with a high degree of resolution. Where do we go from here? What does the design community need in the coming decade to ever-more faithfully anticipate how light operates in the real world? Through this session, we will touch on where we started with digital tools, where we’re at now, and where we’d like to be headed in the future.”