Dear Diallists,
I’m
currently preparing a paper on Polish building code regulations in relation to
provision of sunlight in apartments, and would like to include a chapter on
similar regulations in the other countries.
In general, we have a building code requirement to
provide at least 3 hours of sunlight in at least one room in any type of
apartment, between 7:00 and 17:00 on the days of equinox. In the
dense urban areas (specified in local zoning plans or by administrative
decisions
when there is no zoning plan) the requirement can be limited to at least 1,5
hour
of sunlight, between 7:00 and 17:00, for at least one room in multi-room
apartments,
while one-room apartments (studio) can have no sunlight. It has to be noted
that within the time range given by the building code (that is between
7:00-17:00), it is allowed to sum up separate intervals of sunlight. The
original intention of setting this time range was to not take into
consideration the first and last hour of the day, due to low energetic levels
of the sunlight and low angles of incident sunlight.
The idea of
providing sunlight in apartments has a long history of course, but it was first
so explicitly manifested during Congress of Modern Architecture CIAM in Athens
in 1933, where requirement of providing at least 2-hours of sunlight for every
apartment during winter solstice was included in the conference document -
Athens Charter, manifesto of modern movement in architecture.
Polish
regulations in this subject come from Russia. To my
knowledge they were first introduced in Russia as sanitary regulations in
1963 and in subsequent decades adopted in other countries of the former Soviet
block, but since the collapse of the communism they have evolved separately and
different ways and now they differ quite significantly – but I don’t know many
details unfortunately.
If You have
ever had contact with similar general building code legislation requirements in
Your countries or local law (zoning plan etc.), I would be indebted if You
could share with me its specific requirements.
The goal of
the planned paper is to formulate guidelines for optimizing existing building
code in Poland, as it is not fully clear in details and as a result it poses
many interpretation problems to architects as well dwellers who wish to
verify if the apartment was designed and implemented according to building code
regulations.
Regards,
Maciek Lose
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