Polk County Science Centre
Architect John McAslan and Partners
Lighting design Arup
Client Florida Southern University, Florida
The author visited Florida Southern
University in 1952, shortly after the architect
Frank Lloyd Wright had designed it; it had
been an eye opener, for university buildings of
the day, with Wright’s fondness for natural
light providing a user friendly campus, rich in
exterior landscape. Now some 50 years later
it has suffered from poor construction (Wright
was not responsible for supervision of the
work) and neglect and was desperately in
need of rehabilitation. The work was carried
out by John McAslan with Arup as engineers,
Earl Walls as laboratory planners, and Lunz
Prebor Fowler as executive architects.
In terms of daylighting there were three
types of problem:
- The central atrium which is naturally lit by
east facing clerestorey glazing at high level - Laboratories which are naturally lit by east
and west facing clerestory glazing at high
level
3. Offices and seminar rooms naturally lit by
full height glazing from a variety of
orientations.
The daylighting problems were studied in
model form.
Due to the orientation of the main run of
buildings in a north^south direction, the early
morning east sun and evening west sun
entered the classrooms and laboratories
directly, causing disruptive glare problems.
Many of the windows had been covered with
dark grey film to control the sun, and worse,
were covered with forms of drape or blind
cutting out the daylight.
The clerestorey glazing to the central
atrium was inadequate to allow the natural
lighttofilterdowntothefirstlevel,
rendering the building dim and inhospitable.
In addition, the artificial lighting using
tungsten sources was unable to compensate
for the low levels of natural light. The window
glass was replaced with a light tinted product
to minimize glare from the east and west sun,
a colour balance being struck to ensure that
this did not alter the exterior appearance of
the building for historic purposes.
The original tungsten lighting which had
been used throughout was replaced with
modern energy efficient light sources, such as
fluorescent. A combination of daylight,
functional artificial lighting with some
dramatic artificial sources was used. In this
way improvements were made to the artificial
lighting of the atrium, the laboratory and
classroooms, together with the offices to
ensure that all areas of the building were
brought up to modern standards; however the
needs of daylighting and its relationship with
artificial sources was always a consideration,
to retain as far as possible the original design
intent of the world famous architect.128 Daylighting: Natural Light in Architecture
Ground plan
John McAslan and Partners