Investigation Into Architectural Design Processes With Daylight Point of View: Case of Museum Projects

This paper examines daylight usage as a design tool in architectural projects, as an inspiration point, and as a natural concept creator during building design. Architectural design which is a complex process, includes some basic steps such as; analyses-synthesis-evaluation. At this point, the daylight topic takes big attention during analyses of both the context and the site of the building to make main decisions about the orientation of spaces within the consideration of south-north and east-west directions through sunlight. The sun and daylight orientation of the site constitute an important part of the analyses. Secondly, how daylight usage will affect the form of the building is another important problem of the design process. Some sort of research problems have been developed here such as; Can ‘daylight’ be a source or an inspiration point and concept creator in the case of architectural design? And, detailed results have been presented after a comprehensive literature review and analyses of the selected star architects’ projects. ‘Daylight’ is an important criterion during the architectural design process, and in the article, famous architectural projects have been examined such as; Steven Holl and Zaha Hadid, and Tadao Ando, and how they use daylight as a design tool in their projects have been presented.