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S ome of tomorrow’s lighting designers are learning the fine art of combining daylight with electric light, as part of a design studio course offered at Ball State University in Muncie, IN. Officially known as the “Daylectric Lighting Design Studio,” the course was initiated by a $20,000 grant from the Nuckolls Fund for Lighting Education in 2006 (see sidebar). The 15-week class has been offered twice to date, during the spring semesters of 2007 and 2008.
The course is not all theory and lecture, however. The would-be lighting designers are trying their hand at applying daylectric light to a real building...well, sort of. The “building” in question is actually a hypothetical 5,000-sq-ft branch of the Muncie Public Library situated at a downtown corner location.
Each course included 11 students from the university’s first-year graduate and fourth-year undergraduate architecture programs; the class was divided into five three-week modules. Co-instructors with Prof. Robert Fisher of the Department of Architecture were Prof. Robert J. Koester, director of the Department of Architecture’s Center for Energy Research/Education/Services (CERES), who served as lead instructor, and Prof. Jeffrey Culp, operations manager, CERES. Three visiting lighting designers also taught during the middle weeks of the program.
Fisher believes it’s imperative for universities to begin introducing the concept of architectural integration of daylighting and electrical lighting to their students. “This topic, although highly influential in the practice and experience of architecture, has been under-represented and under-explored within the studio culture of most schools, including our own,” he says. “The design and technology of lighting involves a different approach that is new ground to students.”
ASSIGNMENT: LIBRARY
The 11 students in the studio class were divided into four groups and asked to develop a lighting plan for the hypothetical Muncie Library branch. The instructors provided certain basic architectural characteristics for the building to keep students’ attention on the daylectric area of focus. “We created an architectural brief for the building relating to its form, structure and materiality so the students could concentrate on the daylectric aspects of the program,” says Koestner.
 The objective of the library design was to build readership, especially within the inner-city population, and bring more visitors and activity to the downtown area. The 30-ft-high facility would offer an intimate ambience, stocked with works of contemporary fiction, with emphasis on new releases from popular and new authors. Building amenities would include a coffee shop, Internet lounge, multipurpose digital classrooms and a reading area with carrels. An outside garden reading area would be visually enclosed.
With that information in hand, the students developed lighting concepts using the AGi32 program, which their respective groups then studied and refined into solutions. “The final solutions arrived at by each student group were vastly different,” reports Culp.
Students in the Spring ’08 course “got up to speed quickly,” adds Koester. “They became very proficient with the software, and their building solutions were quite sophisticated.” As the course progressed, it was evident that the students were learning from one another. And by the close of the semester, he adds, “they had developed a unique professional skill–a willingness to hear the other side.”
Moreover, “even though the students were working from prescribed options, they still invested their projects with considerable innovation,” Koester says. Working in teams of three, the students arrived at decisions by majority. According to Koester, the real development of each team’s design took form as the students more fully understood the impacts and implications of their initial selections. “For example, the design of a custom luminaire was influenced by their interior plan and the material palette they had specified for the user spaces. In other cases, the desire to achieve balance in daylighting and electrical lighting necessitated modifications to the plan form or the exterior wall systems,” he explains. “The students had to determine optimum integration of the custom electrical luminaire with the daylighting design strategies being used: top lighting, side lighting and/or ground lighting.”
PROS OFFER CRITIQUE
The Ball State faculty integrated three outside experts into the program. The visiting professionals offered critiques and feedback of the final presentations. The visiting professionals for the first course in 2007 were Joel Loveland, director of the Betterbricks Daylighting Lab, Seattle; Gary Steffy, principal designer and president of Gary Steffy Lighting Design, Inc., Ann Arbor, MI; and Paul A. Zaferiou, principal, LAM Partners, Inc., Cambridge, MA. Steffy returned for the second Daylectric course offered in 2008 and was joined by Jim Benya of Benya Lighting Design, Portland, OR, and David Eijadi, principal of the Weidt Group, Minnetonka, MN.
The instructors agree that their daylectric students are now educated in a way that’s unique compared to graduate students in other schools of architecture throughout the country. By working in teams and applying the AGi32 software, the students have developed a skill set that should serve them well in professional practice. “They are able to enter a firm as ‘walking experts,’ taking with them with the history of an immersive design experience,” says Koester.
 Several students from the 2007 studio were invited to serve as graduate assistants to the 2008 studio, while “others have continued to this day to play a role in the daylighting assessment activities of the CERES Lighting Lab,” Koester adds. Under the direction of Culp, all sessions led by the visiting designers were video recorded to be edited into resource materials. Combined with the web conference, Fisher foresees a growing set of instructional resources to sustain the course and build a library of materials and expertise. The course will be continued beyond the initial Nuckolls Fund grant, Koester says. “The course has made an effective contribution to the Master of Architecture program at Ball State,” Koester says. “The opportunity to interact with the lighting experts for feedback and reviews offers an important long-term opportunity for the continual transformation of studio education.”
A summary of the Daylectric Lighting Design Studio was presented at the international “Teaching in Architecture” conference held last year in Krems, Austria.
Editor’s Note: Images represent concepts from two student groups during the Spring ’08 “Daylectric Lighting Design Studio” course at Ball State.
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