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The natural solution COMMENT
Charlie Sharman of Cantifix discusses how the recent months have reminded us how much we need sunlight, and how glass technology innovations can help architects design for maximised natural light
T
here are many lessons we can take from 2020 about how we live, but, for some of us, it’s also demonstrated that we may also need to rethink where we live.
Cooped up indoors for months on end and cut off from our friends and the world outside, the way our homes work for us, or didn’t, has often been at the forefront of our minds. Whether upping sticks to the countryside, extending for a little more space, or making simple changes to renovate and spruce up what we have, most people found themselves doing something to improve the space they live in.
Having spent even more time indoors during the winter months, it’s the perfect time to consider a crucial, but often improperly understood, element of our indoor environment – natural light. To understand why it’s vital to have access to natural (as opposed to artificial) light, it’s important to understand a bit about our physiology.
Our circadian rhythms, those finely-tuned fluctuations in hormone levels, brain activity and a host of other bodily functions, roughly map onto a 24-hour period (hence ‘circadian’, from the Latin ‘circa’ meaning ‘approximately,’ and ‘dies’ – meaning ‘day’). Over millions of years of evolution, our circadian clocks have learnt to calibrate themselves using fluctuations in light colour and intensity. Simply put, your body responds to sunlight in order to fulfil your particular needs at the time. We evolved in Africa, right by the equator, and our circadian rhythms are still more or less set by light conditions there. In the mornings (relatively low light, more reddish in hue than midday sun), our melatonin (sleep hormone) levels are lowest and our cortisol (the so-called ‘stress’ hormone) peaks, making us more alert.
In the afternoon, our co-ordination, muscle power and reaction times peak, just in time to miss the worst of the equatorial midday
ADF FEBRUARY 2021
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