Maiss Razem

What does daylight mean to you?

Reflecting on my architectural education, I tended to marvel at interiors flooded with daylight afforded by expansive areas of glazing. My attitude has altered with time for several reasons. While I still believe that daylight is essential for our wellbeing and physical health, it ought not to be dealt with merely as a required building metric nor regarded as an uncontested aesthetic subject. How daylight is filtered through the materiality of windows and interacted with by building users (prevented, regulated, celebrated) is negotiated against sociocultural and comfort norms. Examining interactions with windows in residential buildings can begin to access how daylight is part of people’s everyday life and how it is linked to the performance of daily domestic practices (cooking, cleaning, waking up, etc.). 

Daylight then for me has a sociological dimension whose interpretations should be examined differentially amongst social groups and contexts. Through understanding daylight from users’ perspectives, daylight’s practicality and sensory qualities come to the fore. However, the medium of daylight (materiality of windows) deserves equal attention. A sociological understanding of windows and daylight, hence, can offer deeper insights for architects and building and energy policy makers to re-think design of windows, especially in cases when privacy concerns lead to closing windows and relying on artificial light instead of daylight.    

How did your interest in the subject rise?

From living in Jordan, I observed how daylight is underutilized in many houses and apartments. It is a common scene to see windows usually shuttered, especially when they closely overlook neighbouring buildings. Added to that, the use of reflective and tinted windows is prevalent to ensure privacy. Even in villas that have generous glazing areas, users tend to cover them with internal curtains, perhaps for privacy or to moderate the amount of daylight.

From these observations, I increasingly wondered how congruent architectural aesthetic canons are to users’ sociocultural beliefs and habits. What factors led to entrenching certain material choices, like horizontal and coloured windows, in local construction practices? These ponderances also emerged when I practiced and taught architecture, further revealing the deeply lodged and routinized ways of design that leave little space for us to be reflexive or critical. In a later stage of my career after becoming a LEED AP, I also observed that green and sustainable building discourse did not address these issues. Stipulating that windows’ visible transmittance should be more than 0.45 in local codes concerned with energy conservation reflects the importance of daylight but to what extent is it relevant to users’ cultural habits is of no concern. Becoming critical of uncontested use and design of unsustainable glazing materials in local construction, I presented many lectures and led several trainings in Jordan to raise awareness and develop architects’ skills to design better glazing. However, it was only in pursuing a PhD that I seriously wanted to address the social life of windows. Understanding why the current materiality of windows is entrenched in local construction practices and how users interact with the various window affordances (daylight, air, view, solar heating) become an interest that I partially pursued in my PhD in the University of Cambridge, funded by the Islamic Development Bank Cambridge International Scholarship, and supervised by Dr Minna Sunikka-Blank.