Mesopic Vision in Architecture: Exploring Connections between Visual Comfort and Heightened Awareness

This study explores the existence of a particular quality of light that provokes a heightened sense of perceptual awareness. Perhaps because light is such a dominant stimulus in our experience of the world, we tend to be less familiar with its subtleties. For example, visual signals tend provoke less comfort reaction than the way our skin quickly judges thermal or tactile comfort. Yet based on observational experience, this study speculates that our visual perception does trigger these similar precise value judgments; it is just that they are too often ignored. The recovered knowledge of visual perception may be able to be used in architecture to tune the behavior of light in space to maximize both our comfort and our creative intensity.