2024 - Daylight Laboratories

Daylight laboratories is an energy-efficient design using daylight as the major source of light, forming a self-sufficient construction. We embrace daylight in the underground parts of the building by designing several roof or floor skylights. Every single room in that part of the building is designed to fully exploit given daylight possibilities. Moreover, we designed smaller cubatures over the underground parts in order to capture more daylight. On the other hand, we had to overcome the handicap emerging from global warming – that is, an excessive amount of infrared radiation. That is why our design contains energy-efficient glass on the facade. Nevertheless, on the southern part, we were obliged to design brise-soleil, reducing the amount of daylight entering the building.

The design is located on a university campus. Our task was to create physical, chemical, and bio-chemical laboratories of various chemical purity. A special part of our design is the Particle Characterisation Laboratories (PCL), which demand a lack of sunlight in experimental areas, complicated hardware, and segregation of paths taken by laboratory assistants. Nevertheless, we implemented daylight in the PCL area by using skylights that permeabilize only part of the daylight, resulting in indirect light.