VISUAL ENVIRONMENT - THE SYMPOSIUM CONTEXT

摘要

Ralph Hopkinson remarked in 1966 that daylighting technology is more than a branch of illuminating engineering, it is a lighting science in its own right and also much of an art as well. This statement embeds the concept that consideration of human visual perception in the context of our cultural heritage should dominate lighting design and practice. The achievement of human visual satisfaction and the promotion of effective human performance are the goals of effective lighting design. The energy crisis of the 70's led lighting design down an unfortunate path. Lighting design suddenly came to be viewed as essentially an issue of energy conservation. Smaller windows gave lower heat losses. Lamps taken out of visually satisfactory fittings, now unshielded, yielded more lumens/Watt. This was the steam engine logic of Watt applied to a visual environment field. The UK Illuminating Engineering Society, for reasons of administrative economy and not of scientific logic, was persuaded to join the UK HEVAC community within the unified structure of CIBSE. This decision can only be viewed as a scientifically retrograde step when analysed from the point of view of the European lighting environment pioneers of the third quarter of the last century, whose achievements we build on here. The three key figures in Europe then were Ralph Hopkinson, Gunnar Pleijel and Jurgen Krochmann. I knew all three and worked actively with two of them. Recent years have shown the simplified UK professional lighting Agenda yielded poor results in terms of the achievement of better and more productive visual environments. We now begin to see a partial professional demerger between the UK lighting community and the HEVAC community, which reflects the truth. The visual environment does matter.