If you’ve ever wondered what it might be like to live inside a building made entirely of glass, then pay a visit to the Building Centre in London next month where a prototype glass “photon pod” is being erected to test the biological effects of natural daylight.
The 30m2 all-glass drum-shaped enclosure is the first of several to be built across the country as part of the Photon Project, a four-year scientific study into the biological effects of daylight and living under glass being carried out by a scientific research team from Oxford University and glass manufacturer Cantifix.
The prototype is being built outside the Building Centre on Store Street from September 14-22 as part of the London Design Festival, and will incorporate innovative “healthy” glazing designed to allow the optimum amount of natural daylight into the interior, while delivering insulation and solar energy control.
Visitors will be invited to take part in a morning “sunrise experience” inside the pod, from 7am to 9am, designed to test their level of alertness and readiness for the day ahead, and a “sunset experience”, from 6pm to 8pm, that will test their level of relaxation and readiness for sleep.
The 10-minute experiments will require an electronic questionnaire and a non-physical reaction test and the results will be analysed to see how natural light affects health, well-being, mood and behaviour.
The photon pod will be built in London’s Store Street from September 14-22
The four-year Photon Project study will involve a total of 300 participants and its aim is to improve living and working conditions by testing the biological advantages of increasing the amount of daylight in all types of buildings, including residential, commercial, institutional, educational, cultural and leisure.
A two-day Photon Symposium, held on September 16 and 17, will feature scientists, academics, architects, designers and developers debating the links between daylight and science, technology, health, wellbeing, architecture and design.
The research team is led by Russell Foster, professor of circadian neuroscience at Oxford University, whose team is credited with the discovery of non-rod, noncone, photosensitive ganglion cells in the mammalian retina, which provide input to the circadian rhythm system.
The team’s recent research has already proven that disruption to circadian rhythms causes a detrimental effect on health and well-being, implicated in depression, nausea and high blood pressure in the short term, and chronic depression and secondary hypertension over a longer period.
