Sustainable Design: A Room with a View

*"A Room with a View" is part of NJIT's 2023 Research Magazine*

There’s a reason the daylight-filled corner office is a coveted prize for corporate achievers.

“A view from a window has a positive impact on emotions, cognitive performance and thermal comfort,” asserts Won Hee Ko, an assistant professor of architecture. Through experimentation, she seeks to quantify the benefits windows provide and to optimize the amount and quality of natural light that people receive throughout the day.

In her lab, Ko places sensors on the window and at eye and desk levels to measure how the conditions outdoors are filtered through it. She uses a fisheye camera lens to capture incoming visual information, including the level, distribution and color of light, as the human eye would.

“Specific bandwidths in the spectrum are directly related to mental and physical health. In keeping with circadian rhythms, we need more blueish light in the morning and less of it in the afternoon, for example.”

In a randomized study with 86 participants, she and collaborators at the Center for the Built Environment at the University of California-Berkeley found that in rooms with windows, people were happier, had increased working-memory and concentration, and felt cooler and more comfortable, even in slightly overheated spaces.

The latter finding has implications for sustainable design. “If having a view to the outdoors helps occupants increase their satisfaction with a wider indoor temperature range, then we could relax the temperature set points and reduce building energy consumption,” she notes.

In the absence of an established framework for guiding window design, she is developing evidence-based standards for what constitutes window view quality, including the content and clarity of what room occupants can see of the outdoors.

Her goal is to develop models that can simulate design and view to optimize features such as building form, floor plan, orientation and glass selection, at the building and urban planning levels.

“We lack consensus on a unified definition for window view quality that is applicable across occupancies and building types,” she notes, adding, “But I believe windows in everyday spaces should be a minimum design element.”