Evaluating the Performance of Daylighting Inside Interior Spaces of Historic and Ancient Buildings for Identifying Strategies of Designing Facade Openings of Future Buildings

This paper aims to evaluate the performance daylighting, using a validated simulation tool, during the day time based on reading the daylight factor of a specific room, oriented south, in three of the most distinguished buildings in AL Baha region namely, Thee Ain village, Bin Rogosh Palace and Al Dhafeer Village. Each room has been adopted sampling points along the center of the window above a working plane to predict the daylight factor. The average daylight factor of the points was evaluated versus the required daylight factor for the interior space living room, 1%, and an office space, 2%. The conservation of heritage and historic buildings can proceed beyond the its objective and progress to insight designer and engineers to reflect their values on the future and modern structures. Discussing façade criteria of these buildings can have a great effect in formalizing the identity and codes when achieving acceptable visual levels from proper daylighting performance from the aspects of space activities, weather conditions and openings sizing and specifications. The assessment revealed that for a given future building of Al Baha region, the identification of its daylight criteria must be obtained from optimization of the interior space for an average room area of 20m2 and starting WWR 3.5% with an interval of 0.4% for consecutive iterations until the space is well-lit with an acceptable level for its occupants. Due to the lack of obtaining past weather profile that can be concomitant with these structures, a most updated weather profile has been applied and revealed informative results for contemporary buildings. Thus, comfortable indoor environment can be maintained. This paper fulfils a strategy need to study how brand-supportive behavior can be enabled.