The quality of meaning perception in daylight spaces

Light has various forms and degrees which causes latent concepts. Light makes everything seem clear. It is also expressed as a transcendental concept in religion. Beyond this, light has a considerable role to play in designing architectural spaces and without it, neither space nor form and colour, are visible. In architectural spaces, natural light creates various qualities which leads to different meanings and concepts. It is a significant point that light has multi-dimensional aspects which influences human beings’ perception. In other words light is not just a physical necessity but it has psychological and semantic value as an important and noticeable factor, and has affected human life. Therefore in Iranian architecture functional and conceptual approach to the subject of light, leads to creation of spiritual space in addition to functional ones.The multi dimensional nature of light, reveals the necessity of taking attention to its physical and semantic aspects in different disciplines. This research aims to clarify, how the semantic quality of space by receiving daylight, is perceived. The research background shows that the semantic aspects of quality and its relevant parameters, have not been investigated adequately in preceding studies. Considering this, on the one hand and the importance of day light as a natural resource which improves semantic quality of space; on the other hand, provided adequate reason to propose a research which attempts to investigate how the daylight affects the semantic quality of space. The main assumption of this research is that reaching the spiritual light, can be achieved by use of physical light in a targeted way. Therefore, in this paper, a qualitative research methodology with an analytical-interpretational and logical reasoning approach was used to provide an appropriate framework for process of understanding the semantic quality of space using daylight. In order to achieve the considered goals, first, the light was studied in the Holy Qur'an to investigate its function and application in general from the Islamic point of view. Types and degrees of light were extracted and classified at this stage. Second, the levels of meanings, was studied. This study tried to identify the levels of human perception. Determining the levels of space meaning perception and finding its relation with light degrees, clarified the main fact of the study. It manifested that, each one of the light degrees is percept by one of meaning levels. In this process, one of Imam Ali’s valuable expression, relating to this field, was used as an analytical and comparative tool. Consequently and based on previous findings shown in diagrams in the research process, a model of meaning perception, was proposed. This model reveals the quality of reaching spiritual light by the use of physical light. This approach to the subject introduces the light’s role in response to the metaphysical needs of human as opposed to its functional ones. The proposed model can reduce the gap between a high-level conceptual approach to the light and its physical application in architectural spaces and, ultimately can indicate the quality of the space meaning perception.