Trinity College Library, Cambridge (Christopher Wren)

As I touched on in my last post Whren’s design for the library uses similar concepts to those used in the medieval time period. His design consists of one large room 12m wide, 36m long and 10.6.high, of which he positioned on top of an open colonnade located on the ground floor of Neville’s Court. The main glazed facades face East-West and in spite of how it looks on the outside the floor of the library is sunken lower than it would fist seem. 

​The arches on the ground floor were filled in till the bottom of their curved heads to allow the floor of the library to be sunk lower than a normal first floor. By sinking the floor, it allowed for the bookshelves to be positioned against the façade walls perpendicular to the windows to create little coves helping the light passing through to diffuse nicely throughout the room and give a nice comfortable light. This method of raising the level of the windows as well as the ceiling height achieved more uniform and increased natural lighting that could light up the book spines as well as given ample amount of light on the work plane.

Using this design the central corridor (with a Daylight Factor of 3%) is more illuminated than the bays (DF of 0.5%) since it sees more of the unobstructed sky through the windows that increases its Sky Component. The variation of Daylight Factors within each bay is also relatively small (0.5%- 2%) as compared to earlier libraries. This reduces the local brightness contrast and increases visual comfort. 

Author: Kaitlin Watson