Jean-Denis Bernard Marie Ghislain Thiry
Following the path initiated by Britain and the United States, where the evolution of education and the importance of the architecture of schools were debated vigorously by school boards, and mainly under the influence of Germany and the Netherlands, Switzerland has gradually become a benchmark in Europe and worldwide in terms of school construction. This abundance of expertise revealed itself especially after the Second World War with the emergence of a constructive quality concerned with environmental aspects, which incorporated the needs involved in children's education and a proper amount of natural light for classrooms. But since the beginning of the 21st century, designers have not payed so much attention to sunlight or to the orientation of schools, and have instead focused on creating more versatile and scalable learning spaces, even though much of the research done in the field points to the significance of the controlled usage of daylight showing also the positive impact on the well-being of the pupils. Thus, it seems necessary again to make designers more aware of the use of effective daylighting strategies, and to convince them to stop relying on oftentimes permanent artificial lighting at substantial energy costs. Based on a desire to combine a theoretical and historical approach with a technical one to assess the level of performance of daylight in teaching spaces, the thesis is organized in two successive and interdependent parts. The first part aims to give an overview of the typological evolution of primary schools and their daylighting strategies implemented in Switzerland from 1945 to 2015. To this end, a broad survey of schools featured in four major architectural journals was conducted, namely: Werk, Bauen + Wohnen; L'Architecture d'aujourd'hui; Techniques & Architecture; The Architectural Review. The development of the formal, constructive and distributive characteristics of the projects was analyzed and compared with the daylighting strategies of class units, while demonstrating the significant impact of foreign influences on Swiss construction. Four major school « types » were identified from a total of 332 schools studied, that are, the pavilion type, the articulated type, the modular type, and the monoblock type. We then selected school models representative of the types of schools built most frequently in Switzerland and their associated daylighting strategies. The second part offers an analysis of the daylighting impact on selected schools for the purpose of quantifying the different levels of illumination, and studying the resulting lighting ambiances. To this end, several in situ measurement campaigns were undertaken applying a systematic protocol. Through iterative variation of different parameters of the modeled class units, the objective is then to identify architectural models and design principles that provide appropriate levels of illumination for students, while comparing the different school types from our initial theoretical survey. In addition to retracing the typological evolution of 70 years of school construction in Switzerland in terms of the original perspective on daylighting, this research aims to provide a collection of examples of good architectural practices, as well as objective criticism of the daylighting strategies of Swiss schools and related literature, for the purpose of having a positive influence on decisions regarding the design of the schools of tomorrow.
EPFL2019
