A Window View Quality Assessment Framework

ABSTRACT

The views that windows provide from inside a building affect human health and well-being. Although window view is an important element of architecture, there is no established framework to guide its design. The literature is widely dispersed across different disciplinary fields, and there is a need to coalesce this information into a framework that can be applied into the building design. Based on the literature, we present a framework for what constitutes “view quality.” At the basis of our framework, we propose three primary variables: View Content (the assessment of visual features seen in the window view); View Access (the measure of how much of the view can be seen through the window from the occupant’s position); and View Clarity (the assessment of how clear the view content appears in the window view when seen by an occupant). Each variable was thematically derived from different sources including daylighting standards, green certification systems, and scientific research studies. We describe the most important characteristics of each variable, and from our review of the literature, we propose a conceptual index that can evaluate the quality of a window view. While discussing the index, we summarize design recommendations for integrating these three variables into the building process and identify knowledge gaps for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• View
• window
• daylighting
• building design
• occupant health

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Lisa Heschong, Prof. Peter Tregenza, and the CBE industry partners for their feedback on this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Center for the Built Environment (CBE), at the University of California, Berkeley; and the Republic of Singapore’s National Research Foundation through a grant to the Berkeley Education Alliance for Research in Singapore (BEARS) for the Singapore-Berkeley Building Efficiency and Sustainability in the Tropics (SinBerBEST) Program.