No-Greenery Line and Greenery-View Factor, New Architectural Design Tools

Abstract

The paper proposes a new tool for evaluation of the degree of visual contact with the outdoor greenery, the Greenery-View factor (GV), intended to be easy to grasp and simple to use. It starts with the construction of a No-greenery line (similar to the No-sky line) on the vertical section of the building with the neighbouring greenery included. No-greenery line divides the space into a part with the view to the greenery and the rest of the room from which the greenery is not visible. To find out the part of the floor area of the room from which the greenery can be seen, the section-point between the no-greenery line and the line representing the eye-level is projected down at the floor plan. The GV factor stands for the part of the floor area with the view to the greenery expressed as a percentage of the whole floor area of the room. The No-sky line and the No-greenery line can be used together by architects and urban planners as extremely simple and powerful couple of graphical tools. The paper discusses also how the GV factor could be implemented in the new European daylight standard EN-17037 Daylight in buildings (2018). © 2020 The Author(s). Published by solarlits.com. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).