Evaluating the Impact of Skylight on Daylighting Performance for The El Guadual Children Centre

This paper examines the integration of skylights in sustainable architectural design, focusing on the case of The El Guadual Children Centre, located in Villa Rica, Cauca, Colombia. The project exemplifies sustainable design principles and community-centered architecture that is also awarded by LEED Platinum-certified building. Two main issues have been identified: lacking information on the daylight performance via computer simulation and limited analysis on the impact of skylight proposals to the daylight performance. The primary objectives for this research are to evaluate and simulate the existing daylighting performance of the building by using the selected computer software. Furthermore, this research aims to investigate and quantify the impact of the proposed skylight on the daylight performance. Via integration by two simulation tools which are LightStanza and Rhino 7, the study analyses the building's baseline daylighting performance and assesses the improvements after the integration of skylights. Comparative analysis is done to evaluate key metrics of illuminance levels before and after the installation of the skylights. The results clearly show that integrating skylights provides considerably better daylight distribution, reduces the reliance on electric lighting, and consequently leads to energy efficiency.