Passive Solar Techniques and Interior Design Basics: Uses of Light and Color

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Don't forget about natural light and the effects of color when you're designing your home. PHOTO: FOTOLIA/ ANNA

This series of Ken Kern's work is being taken from two home building and design guides, The Owner-Built Home (already published) and The Owner-Built Homestead  (not yet published in 1974). They are not presented in chronological order due to a desire to print the Homestead chapters as they are written. This chapter covers aspects of designing for natural light and passive solar building effects, as well as color choices for atmosphere, personality and psychological impressions. —MOTHER 

All content copyright © 1972 by Ken Kern.  

Chapter Excerpted from The Owner-Built Home and Homestead: Light and Color

The modern tendency for a professional expert to overemphasize the importance of his particular field (to the neglect of other, equally important fields) is as common an occurrence in the building business as it is anywhere else in our over-specialized work-world. Illumination experts, for instance, specify an artificial light intensity of from 50 to 100 foot candles for most visual tasks. But experts in the field of light and color conditioning warn against the use of more than 30 to 35 foot-candles (they quote opthalmologists who say that visual efficiency rises sharply as light intensity is increased to a level of about 30 foot-candles). Further light intensity is apt to cause visual distraction and glare.

Electrical engineers devise ingenious ways to provide high intensity daytime artificial lighting to rooms that are blocked off with one value walls used for storage and insulation. Millions of dollars are wasted on artificial illumination for want of basic knowledge of natural daylight design. On the other hand, those engineers who choose to work with natural illumination become confronted with over-complicated design formulas. The complication lies in the fact that natural illumination may be direct from the sun, indirect from the sky, and reflected from the ground. Consequently, more and more complicated—and expensive—control devices are resorted to, such as reflectors, glass prisms, plastic louver walls, hanging louvers, and diffused glazing materials of all sorts. Some lighting engineer extremists, like West Coast expert Foster Sampson, tell us that, "it really doesn't make much sense to get light through windows in the vertical wall." Skylights and clearstory windows become alternative solutions. Skylights, of course, are a very effective means of interior lighting. Improved "sky dome" varieties have been recently developed, with two layers of frosted or translucent material to eliminate bright spots of sunshine and provide air-space insulation.