Abstract

This paper presents evidence on lighting design decisions through a decision support system application. The proposed system is developed for lighting historical buildings through a specific methodology. The methodology used does not rely merely on an artistic or visual approach, but rather introduces a toolset that helps facilitate lighting design decisions regardless of the building’s historical period. This is achieved through the collection of the most important decorative and architectural elements on façades of historical buildings and filtering them to find shared elements. The façades are then procedurally decomposed into modules according to the collection of elements, and each module is lit and tested through lighting simulations. The simulations then form a database of possible lighting scenarios, which is finally evaluated in a reverse process, to test the visual result of the building as a whole. This reverse process is scrutinized by experts in the field of lighting design. The most promising results are classified and present a number of different methods on how to light the façade of a historical building.