Anatomy of a Lighting Course
A novel approach to teaching architecture students the ways of the sun
Source: ARCHITECTURAL LIGHTING Magazine
Publication date: 2008-11-01
By Rachel Levitt On the surface, Boston Architectural College (BAC) may seem an unlikely place to find innovative teaching. It is a small evening school in a 1960s concrete slab building (sporting a huge trompe l'oeil mural of a classical structure that can be seen from the portion of the Massachusetts Turnpike that runs through downtown Boston) with open enrollment and a predominantly volunteer faculty. But this outward appearance belies the BAC's incredible strengths: It was one of the first architecture schools to introduce “concurrent practice,” incorporating professional work in the design field into the curriculum, which so many programs nationwide now emulate. Also, its privileged location in the center of Boston means that plenty of nascent architects who dream of teaching provide a healthy supply of educational innovators.
Dan Weissman was one of those young visionaries. In 2005, as he was completing his undergraduate architecture degree at Washington University in St. Louis, the Milwaukee native was recruited by fellow alum William Lam to join high-profile Cambridge, Mass.–based lighting design firm Lam Partners. Once in the office, Weissman, who was armed with just a single lighting class from his architectural coursework that split the semester with acoustics, had to soak up knowledge on the job. And he did; fast enough to be recruited by Lam to assist teaching a core lighting course at the BAC the following year. (Lam Partners has been involved with the BAC lighting courses since 1986, frequently calling on the assistance of recent graduates who are new employees to provide a broader sense of lighting practice beyond the traditional office workplace.)
Weissman knew from working at Lam, and from his own formal education, that architects could benefit from a stronger introduction to the principles of lighting. There had been plenty of times while he was at Lam Partners that an architect's lack of basic knowledge about daylighting principles shocked him. He had seen a number of highly developed projects in the office that would have been much more complete if the original designers had had a better awareness and understanding of daylighting principles and techniques.
Practical work experience also taught Weissman how he learned best—by doing. He had learned lighting from colleagues and through simple trial and error. Returning to the classroom, Weissman was acutely aware that a studio-like setting would be the best way to convey to students the phenomenological aspects of working with light. “Instructors tend to give too much information all at once, but architectural students think differently from engineers—they are empirical learners, not number crunchers,” he says. “The challenge is to pull out the big issues, discuss them thoroughly, and let students explore iterations of a design problem.”
So Weissman did what anyone with energy and a touch of hubris would do: He designed his own series of ambitious lighting courses for the BAC, one on daylighting and one on electric lighting, both with integrated workshops. This series would supplement the BAC's existing four-week lighting course for architecture students and semester-long course for interior design students. Based on the studio model, Weissman's classes would be taught the way architects and designers learn best. Students would be given a kit of tools to shape daylight, and the course would be enhanced by a constant feed of projects that exemplify both good and bad lighting. The workshop also would set up a client-consultant relationship among the students so that the class would approximate the apprenticeship experience.
While he was forming his syllabus, fellow faculty at the BAC and coworkers at Lam told him about the Nuckolls Fund for Lighting Education, and Weissman decided to apply for the fund's $20,000 grant that is awarded to a nonprofit school to underwrite an innovative course in architectural lighting design. With his grant-writing physician father as his editor, Weissman's proposal was successful. In explaining the decision to present the 2007 Lesley Wheel Introductory Lighting Program grant to the BAC, Nuckolls Fund president Jeffrey Milham says, “The BAC sees the workshops as eventually expanding into a minor in lighting, a certificate in lighting design, and assistance to students in obtaining the intern lighting certified status. This is the kind of forward-thinking approach that we feel is a good investment.”
The inaugural workshop, titled Light | Space, was held in spring 2007. Weissman divided his daylighting semester into three sections, which he named Awareness, Trial, and Reiteration. The Awareness section summarized Weissman's first few months on the job at Lam, giving students different ways to understand the basic properties of sunlight. Students spent time drawing from life, striving to capture the qualities of light through various media, and worked with sun calculators to develop their predictive skills.
The Trial section let students test their assumptions through case studies. They imagined and then drew how light would penetrate and reflect in a space. It was here that they learned rudimentary ways to use architecture to control light in a space or on a surface. Weissman, who is not a fan of high-tech bells and whistles, prefers simple architectural moves to shape light for a space's needs. To get his students to understand this way of thinking, he had them build physical models, position them on a heliodon—a tilting or rotating table with a light source to represent the sun, which is used to study how the sun's rays interact with a scale model of a building design—and photograph the interiors to document the effects of the changing light. The students then could rework their designs on the spot. “Physical models are much better teaching devices than computer models,” Weissman explains. “They're not precious. Students can just slice off an overhang or duct tape a little more on to change the design. Computer models take a lot of time to develop, and I think that's why designers stop tweaking and fall back on techy solutions.”
During the Reiteration phase of the course, students reinvented a previous studio project of their own, this time working the characteristics of sunlight into their design. They modeled their projects, put them through the heliodon test, and modified them based on their new understanding of sunlight. “The students found that they could use daylighting as a design-generator, and many ended up with much more interesting overall solutions,” he says.
Weissman taught only one semester before leaving for graduate school in architecture at the University of Michigan, but Will Lewis, also of Lam Partners, took over teaching the class in fall 2008. Erudite and thoughtful, Lewis says that the real work of the course is in teaching students how people experience light, and how it affects their moods. He mentions the burgeoning field of biophilia, which studies the relationship between biology and design. “At the beginning of the course, we researched fringe topics like the origins of daylight savings time, the effects of light on jetlag, and how sunlight changes people's productivity.”
Lewis enjoys letting the students make discoveries for themselves, especially when it comes to changing age-old misconceptions. “The general opinion is that the more daylighting, the better, so students frequently start with designs that have way too much glass. A few of them had lots of frosted glazing on their original models,” he says. “When we put them in the sun, they were surprised at how strong the light was. It was blinding.”
Lewis tries to teach his students how to ask better questions about the architectural program to determine the appropriate lighting response. “These are all important learning tools. When you combine materials with architecturally integrated devices like light shelves, overhangs, and vertical shading, you can avoid all the expensive applied hardware. Many high-tech devices are simply not cost-effective.”
Lewis has an architectural engineering degree from Pennsylvania State University, where he learned a technical approach to lighting through computer modeling. “Making a computer model takes a lot of time, it's a specialized skill,” he says. “But a physical model is quick and it informs design in a different way.”
According to Lewis, while he was at Penn State, the daylighting focus was on cost-analysis. “But in the end, we found that daylighting doesn't pay for itself in the short run,” he says. “The productivity and psychological aspects make daylighting so valuable, and that's harder to quantify.” Weissman adds that if architects understood the sun better, they would use it as a design tool. “So many buildings are improved just by reorienting them slightly to maximize daylight,” he notes.
Karen L. Nelson, the BAC's director of the advanced architecture studios, is already impressed with the impact of daylighting knowledge on student designs. “I've gotten to see two students' portfolios with work from the course and I have to say that they are the most spatially rich work I've seen yet,” she says. “Lighting adds a new dimension to the students' designs, and I'm hoping this course will spread like wildfire.”
Project 2007 Lesley Wheel Introductory Lighting Program Grant
School Boston Architectural College, Boston
Course Light | Space: Integrated Sustainable Lighting Design Workshop
Instructors Dan Weissman and Will Lewis
Photos, Sketches, and Charts Courtesy of Dan Weissman and the BAC
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