Aspiring Scientific Design: Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer’s Petersschule Project and Daylighting Scholarship

This paper looks at the advancement and implementation of daylighting calculations in architectural design during High Modernism. Particularly, it analyzes the engineering and architectural discourses on daylighting in the 1920s with respect to the arguments they delivered for healthy school environments. Using the case study of Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer’s famous 1926 project for the Petersschule in Basel, Switzerland, the paper intends to show the modernist stretch between scientific abstraction and design synthesis. In the 1920s, declaring good daylighting design as the first objective for a healthy school was not a new topic. For decades, school regulations had included recommendations for window designs, class room orientations, window-to-floor ratios, and sky-view angles, among others. With advancements in lighting science, for example the definition and measurement of illuminance, such empirical knowledge was increasingly disapproved in favor of more mathematical approaches to design. Meyer and Wittwer’s use of the“calculation procedure after Higbie and Levin” exemplifies how architects attempted to incorporate the state-of-the art knowledge of daylighting in design. Henry Harold Higbieand A. Levin published their calculation methods of daylight intensity in the Transactions of the Illuminating Engineering Society in May 1925 and March 1926, only shortly before the Petersschule competition. Analyzing the calculations, this paper tries to retrace how they influenced the design. Since Meyer and Wittwer also referred to several rules of thumb, one can speculate whether the architects’ empirical knowledge had initially helped them developing their design, while calculations served as later verification.