In classrooms, where the learning process takes place and which cater to many users, indoor visual comfort and energy efficiency are essential for user health and academic success. Ensuring the homogeneous distribution of daylight indoors in classrooms is a significant problem that must be addressed during the design of educational buildings. To address this issue, designers use artificial elements such as shading and louvres in the building envelope. However, producing these elements results in carbon emissions, and they do not decompose naturally once their lifespan is over. Considering the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDG) target of achieving net-zero emissions in cities by 2050, it is necessary to minimise emissions from these elements. Within this scope, the study aims to highlight the importance of landscaping in educational buildings to control the amount of natural light entering indoor spaces. Within the scope of the study, two identical classrooms at Balıkesir University Faculty of Architecture were examined. While there is no landscape area in front of the northeast-facing D1 classroom, there is a landscaped area with vegetation in front of the southwest-facing D2 classroom. The study examined the distribution of daylight in these classrooms during the day. It evaluated the effects of the landscape on the daylight performance of the interior spaces by conducting on-site point measurements with a light meter at 9:30, 12:30, and 15:30 on 21 June, the summer solstice. According to the measurement results, the northeast-facing D1 classroom had relatively high illuminance near the windows in the morning. In contrast, the D2 classroom had plants in front of its windows and had a homogeneous daylight distribution throughout the day. The study highlights that optimisation methods can be used in future studies to control the amount of daylight entering the interior of educational buildings through landscaping.
Ünlütürk et al. (Sun,) studied this question.