Locations
Natural Light and Time’s Passage at the Regent Park Aquatic Centre
The Regent Park Aquatic Centre is a place for civic recreation: a place for becoming healthy while building community. Physical and social health are vital for a good city. And the aquatic centre makes exemplary use of natural light to achieve this goal.
At the aquatic centre, light emanating from skylights casts grey and blue shadows onto the white wall below. From sunrise to sunset, these shadows continually shift – stretching, contracting and stretching again – across the wall. These changes are visible to swimmers, waiting parents, lifeguards and anyone else spending an hour by the pool.
The aquatic centre’s generous windows allow sunlight to pour in, turning the pool water into a sparkle and splashing a kaleidoscope of light and shadows onto the walls and ceiling. But if, outside, a cloud should pass in front of the sun, everything will suddenly change. The sun’s rays will diffuse, darkening the aquatic centre as if someone adjusted a dimmer switch.
These changes in luminosity come and go in cycles determined by nature’s whim. Sometimes they last for minutes; other times they last for days. And the quality of light changes too. During summer, visitors can swim in sunlit waters as late as 9 p.m., and during fall evenings, swimmers are bathed in autumn’s golden light.
Most buildings are not so affected by outside light (nor by outside temperature, precipitation, humidity, sounds and smells). Buildings can become pods, worlds unto themselves that disconnect the people inside from whatever is outside. The building where a city council meets, a student chooses their career path, a judge determines a sentencing or citizens gather to build community can become places of disconnect, insulation and isolation.
Sometimes this disconnect is intentional: Casinos and shopping centres profit from their lack of windows, which causes patrons to lose track of time. Other times, the disconnect is unintended. Perhaps windows were not thought important or they couldn’t be justified in the budget. But buildings that ought to connect their inhabitants to what’s beyond the four walls ought to make good use of natural lighting.
Windows are a gateway between the goings-on inside a building and the goings-on outside. They bring the outside, inside. More specifically, they allow natural light to remind us gently of the dynamic and ever-changing world that exists beyond the building’s otherwise static environment. These changes activate our temporal perception (our sense of time), which brings enormous benefits.
These benefits are easy to experience, though they can be hard to talk about and quantify. Nevertheless, here are some of them.
Built places that engage our sense of time help us become aware of the present moment, which can be a source of joy and happiness.
To be aware of time is not trivial; time is a parameter surrounding the human condition. We always exist in time. To be aware of time is to be aware of our humanity.
Experiencing dynamic lighting conditions is an aesthetic experience, a pleasure in and of itself, as is watching a sunset.
Our temporal awareness that arises from experiencing changes in daylight is not an awareness of “clock time”; it’s an awareness of a different kind of time: “qualitative time.” Noticing it’s sunset is different from noticing it’s 7 p.m. Noticing that shadows have stretched all the way across the white wall since your arrival is different from noticing you spent three hours at the pool. Experiencing qualitative time offers us a refreshing and meaningful interpretation of time.
Finally, noticing that the shadows at the aquatic centre are a little longer each day when you arrive for your swim class at 6 p.m. (because our planet’s seasonal tilt is always changing) is to notice that reality is changing and unstable, even though our temporal conventions (i.e., clock-time) indicate otherwise.
When installing skylights and large windows is not an option, it’s possible to improve a building’s quality of light by introducing decorations that interact with light such as stained glass, coloured films or multifaceted reflective surfaces. These small changes can have a big impact since they amplify subtle changes in external lighting conditions.