Proposal for revised criteria for daylight provision in the European daylight standard based on calculations for Swedish multifamily residential buildings

Abstract

The European Standard EN 17037 was first introduced in 2018 with the aim of encouraging building designers to ensure adequate daylight in buildings. Experience has shown that the standard’s criteria for daylight provision are generally perceived to be too challenging, and this in turn has hindered its implementation in national legislations. This paper proposes a revised illuminance-based criteria for daylight provision using the specific case of regularly occupied rooms in multifamily Swedish residential buildings as an example. In total, 3562 rooms representing typical Swedish residential design are assessed. Two sets of criteria for dwellings are proposed; one based on a fixed illuminance, another based on a fixed area fraction. Both have three levels of ambition, in which the lowest would result in approximately two-thirds of the investigated Swedish dwellings reaching compliance. This is the same compliance rate as for the current national legislation. The implications of three proposed criteria on residential design are also discussed. While results are given for the Swedish context, the proposed criteria could be generalized for use in other European countries. The intention of this proposal is to allow for a wider application of the daylight standard within residential construction across Europe.