You cannot sculpt natural light as you can a hunk of marble. You cannot weld it as you can a beam of steel.
Though it is intangible, natural light has a presence that is palpable. It can pour through windows and dance on walls. It can bless the inside of a cathedral with a symbol of the divine. It even can make the day seem shorter. Ask Kelly Meadows, a chemist who used to labor in a Northwestern University laboratory with no windows.
Now she works for Quest International, a Dutch company that develops flavors and ingredients for food manufacturers. Whipping up its new office and laboratory facility in Chicago’s suburbs, Quest followed a distinct recipe: Everybody has a taste for natural light.
So its three-story, L-shaped structure is downright skinny. The building’s broad side measures nearly 400 feet long by 48 feet wide. In essence, laboratories and offices that could have been bunched together have been strung along a corridor. As a result, natural light streams into all but a few work areas.
“You can see the weather,” says Meadows, pausing while making bread loaves in Quest’s bakery lab. “When you can see outside, you don’t feel like you’re being deprived.”
It’s no accident that her light-filled lab was built by a company from Europe. Throughout the continent, experts say, it is customary to provide all workers, no matter what their rank, with access to natural light.
In the United States, by contrast, executives typically occupy perimeter offices, which offer proximity to daylight and views. Lower-ranking workers are relegated to interior spaces where sunlight and the surroundings of a building barely can be glimpsed.
Increasingly, however, some American workplaces are employing a different approach.
At Quest International’s North American Business and Technology Center–designed by Andrew Metter of Chicago architects A. Epstein and Sons International and located near the Sears, Roebuck & Co. Merchandise Group headquarters in northwest suburban Hoffman Estates–daylight is not a perk reserved for those with high status.
Even the building’s bathrooms have natural light. Frosted glass windows provide privacy as well as daylight.
At the nearby Ameritech Center, a massive low-slung building also in Hoffman Estates, skylit gallerias and atriums brighten what otherwise would be a cavernous interior.
Farther up the Northwest Tollway, at the Safety-Kleen Corp. headquarters in Elgin, loft-like interior spaces are arranged in tiers, so that offices far from the windows are higher than the rest of the floor. That affords their occupants better views. In addition, a light well allows natural light to bounce off a curving interior wall and into offices. Safety-Kleen is the world’s largest recycler of automotive and industrial waste fluids.
Both Ameritech and Safety-Kleen, designed by Chicago architects Lohan Associates, reverse the typical arrangement of placing managers’ offices on the perimeter and clerical areas on the inside. Indeed, some argue that this arrangement should be the norm because clerical workers need more natural light.
“You see the executives in the corner offices or the perimeter offices, and they do not have difficult visual tasks. They’re usually talking on the phone,” says Marietta Millet, associate professor of architecture at the University of Washington and a specialist in lighting design.
“Then, you see the clerical staff, who have difficult visual tasks–reading and filing and typing–stuck in the middle of the room. If it were done by use of need for light, it would be exactly the opposite.”
Studies indicate that workers in such buildings are more productive and have a greater sense of well-being than their counterparts who work in typical offices. In addition, many workers say the presence of natural light makes them feel connected to the rhythms of the day and to the outdoor environment.
It saves money too
And there are economic advantages to natural lighting.
A report by the Rocky Mountain Institute of Snowmass, Colo., titled “Greening the Building and the Bottom Line,” shows that increased daylight was linked to fewer days lost to absenteeism. In eight commercial buildings covered by the study, there were significant savings on heating and cooling.
“In new building design, I think these kinds of daylight measures will pay for themselves on energy savings in the first year. And the gains in productivity can far exceed the energy saving,” says one of the report’s authors, Joseph Romm, now an energy and productivity specialist at the Department of Energy in Washington, D.C.
In the early 20th Century, natural light was essential to making the workplace pay. Because electric lighting was still primitive at the time, companies put a premium on space lit by the sun. Shallow office suites, measuring 28 to 30 feet from outermost window to innermost wall, commanded the highest rents. Anything deeper than that was too dark.
In downtown Chicago, many turn-of-the-century office buildings were arranged in the form of hollow squares. Light courts pierced the centers of such blocky structures as the Santa Fe Center, 224 S. Michigan Ave., illuminating an inner ring of office suites. The outer ring drew light from perimeter windows. Often they consisted of a large, fixed pane flanked by two narrow, operable windows. These unique “Chicago windows” drew light, as well as the breeze, inside, a major plus in the days before air conditioning.
Technological advances changed all this, a point made by architectural historian Carol Willis in her new book, “Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago” (Princeton Architectural Press).
In the years following World War II, she writes, “fluorescent bulbs provided high levels of illumination without excessive heat, making it possible to rent quality office space much deeper than the old standard of 28 to 30 feet. Cool fluorescents rendered light courts unnecessary, so that all internal space could be exploited.”
Other changes had an impact. Air conditioning eliminated the need for operable windows. Businesses grew in size during the postwar era and needed more floor space for their work forces and new equipment, such as computers. Many companies sought to consolidate operations on large floors.
By 1974, when the 110-story Sears Tower was constructed, each of its 50 office floors had about 40,000 square feet of rentable office space–more than double the space in a typical 1920s office building in Chicago. Whereas the depth of a typical office space once was 28 to 30 feet, Sears’ office areas were as deep as 70 feet, putting workers farther from the sunlight than ever.
Comparable technologies have been available for European office buildings, but a different outlook has tended to keep building floor sizes smaller than in the United States, thus providing more natural light.
“In America, buildings are developer driven. In Europe, they’re end-user driven,” says Keith Palmer, vice president of Murphy-Jahn, a Chicago architectural firm headed by architect Helmut Jahn, which has designed office buildings on these shores and overseas.
The emphasis on the “end-user” is typified by the Quest building, where the daylight approach costs more in the short term but is expected to produce long-term savings. Architect Metter estimates that the additional wall surfaces, windows and internal ducts made necessary by the building’s elongated shape added 5 to 10 percent to its construction cost. But gains in productivity are expected to make up the difference.
“It’s not acceptable to have people working in an environment where they’re secluded from the environment,” says Richard Graves, manager of Quest’s project engineering group.
Ocean liner on the prairie
Clad in a taut skin of white galvanized steel panels, with bands of gray-tinted windows running across its facade, the Quest building resembles a machine in the landscape. Near the midpoint of its 400-foot-long side are three smoke-stack-like exhaust vents that suggest an ocean liner. A pair of entrance canopies extend outward, evoking the overhanging eaves of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie School of architecture.
But the imagery of the building is less important than its plan. One enters the L-shaped structure at a “knuckle” between its two wings. Inside is a 25-foot-tall lobby with a drum-like cylinder that encloses a conference room. You can look through tall, slender windows at the back of the lobby to see the rest of the drum and the shorter office wing. Appropriately, the palette is light, with white walls and stainless steel detailing.
To the left of the lobby is the long wing. On one side of its 6-foot-wide corridor are offices and laboratories 18 feet wide. On the other side are offices and labs 24 feet wide. Stairs are naturally and artificially lit, providing vertical elements that punctuate the mostly horizontal facade, in addition to the smokestacks.
To the right of the lobby is the short wing, with administrative offices, an employee cafeteria, a workout room, and a brilliantly lit customer service area.
It probably is not coincidental that such innovations are being undertaken in suburbia, where wide-open spaces offer more room to spread out on big plots of land. In a sense, the light-filled suburban workplaces have come full circle to another non-center city office building–Wright’s S.C. Johnson & Son Administration Building–the so-called Johnson Wax Building–in Racine, Wis.
Completed in 1939, it features a vast main workroom with white columns shaped like lily pads. Opaque skylights are set between these columns. Where the cornice would ordinarily be, directly below the roof, are bands of glass.
Wright wrote that the workroom was supposed “to be as inspiring a place to work in as any cathedral ever was in which to worship.” With everyone sharing access to daylight, Johnson Wax truly is an example of the architecture of democracy.
