Client: Trident Park, Malta
Architect: ritchie*studio, London
Lighting Design: Ulrike Brandi Licht
Completion: 2022

For the conversion of the long former brewery building into an office building, the architects designed cut-outs in the building down to the first floor to provide the respective office floors with daylight. The large area in the basement also receives so much daylight that offices were accommodated there.

Laterally, the glass facades of the “Sunken Gardens” light the rooms on the basement level; in the center, this is accomplished through “skylight tables” in the gardens on the first floor level.

We explored two strategies to further increase daylighting:

1. On the rooftop garden, we projected heliostats that track the sun along its path and capture direct sunlight from any direction. They feed these enormous amounts of light through fiber optic cables that run to the basement floors. There, daylighting fixtures on the ceiling shine into the office spaces. This principle is obvious, since Malta has a sunshine probability of about 95%. The principle proved to work perfectly, but the investment costs for the system were still too high the time.
2. For the realization we investigated the design of the “skylight tables” with or without internal light control in the middle area of the offices. Among other things, we investigated the additional possibility of placing semi-transparent glass elements at an angle under the skylights in order to direct daylight more widely into the rooms. It turned out that the simplest version works best.

This project shows that a daylighting design that was thought through from the beginning opens up economic advantages for the client. The areas in the basement could not have been used as offices without good daylight planning by the architect and lighting designer alike.