Geraldine Quek

What does daylight mean to you?

For me, I think of daylight as a double-edged sword. The fascination of where and when daylight meets architecture is what intrigues me – daylight in interiors can directly impact people’s comfort, health, and well-being. On one hand, when well-regulated, sufficient daylight can light up dark interiors, entrain our circadian health and offer thermally and visually comfortable spaces for work, play and rest. However, excessive daylight may cause over-heating, uncomfortable glare leading to increased energy use to compensate for the discomfort. How can designers consider this delicate balance of occupant comfort in daylit interior spaces? To design comfortable daylit spaces in the digital age, we have to improve our knowledge on the threshold between comfort and discomfort and use evidence-based workflows. In my Ph.D. research, I aim to extend the applicability of prediction metrics for discomfort glare from daylight through targeted user studies.

How did your interest in the subject rise?

My interest in daylighting arose during my architectural education, where daylight was a recurring theme in my studio projects and electives, qualitatively at first, then quantitatively using daylighting simulations. During one of our advanced electives on lighting taught by Prof. John Alstan Jakubiec, I remember being most excited when we replicated the daylighting in the Couvent Sainte-Marie de la Tourette designed by Le Corbusier through simulations. I was then interested in the subjective perceptions of people towards different lighting qualities, which I focused on in my master’s thesis. After my formal studies, I continued researching daylighting in Singapore under the tutelage of Prof. Jakubiec, building calibrated climate-based daylighting models for long-term visual quality evaluations through one-time measurements of office buildings. All of this has led to my current Ph.D. research topic at the Laboratory of Integrated Performance in Design (LIPID), where I’m collaborating with Prof. Marilyne Andersen and Dr. Jan Wienold to improve visual comfort prediction metrics using semi-controlled user studies.