Daylight Control Strategy: from Digital Design Process to Tailored Panes.

Daylighting design is vital today to increase user health, task performance and satisfaction, especially in creating a perfect balance between natural light and artificial light. Daylighting design can be enhanced through the use of digital fabrication technologies, for rapid prototyping of accurate scale models, that can facilitate natural lighting assessment and optimized components fabrication. In order to display different lighting parameters, like benefits and spectral distribution, various computer software have evolved, so they can accurately render daylighting effects. DIALux is a lighting simulation software, that can mock-up a wide range of material types and forms based on realistic physical models and it can provide digital simulations and visualisations of daylighting solutions and room appearances. The relationship between designing and manufacturing complex shapes can be redefined through the integration of computer-aided design and digital simulation for architectural aims. The project concerns the lighting design of a historical museum, Fondazione Magnani Rocca in Traversetolo, Parma, whose exhibition rooms have to be re-arranged, because of inappropriate lighting levels, so the plan requires suitable lighting technology project, also in order to reduce drastically artificial lighting, creating a shading system that allows diffusing light and blocking direct sunlight, in relation to very different lighting scenes. This is the reason that has led to definition of self-supporting, movable, modular opal-glass panels, to be displayed in front of windows and independent of the walls of the historical building. Panels are modelled using DIALux, which allows to evaluate every parameters, considering the most suitable form, inclination, size and complex morphology of glass panels, including artificial and natural lighting effects on 3D surface. Panels allow the exact required amount of natural light to filter through curved glass panels, as well as the daylight that penetrates from the windows is screened using opal glass, offering a quantitative determination of the lighting variables which are significant to form-giving panels characteristics. The digital design process of curved glass panels (that can be also backlit, with a diversified artificial lighting system, hidden in the back of glass, completing the illusion that there is much more daylight in the space than is actually present) tested by the software, allows to accurately produce components like curved panes, to reduce time and material waste, by testing the effects and benefits of different glass employing, to yield an optimal solution . This procedure eliminates many geometric constraints imposed by traditional drawings or physical calculation methods, and production process, that makes complex curved shapes much easier to handle and it will reduce dependence on standard mass-produced components, by creating a digital continuum, from file to factory. Digital design tecnology permits to produce non standardized repetitive panes directly from digital data, making “uniqueness” as economic and affordable to achieve as the notion of “manufacturing repetition”.