Advancing architectural science

A number of types of contributions are important to advancing architectural science. There are three main types of contributions to the advancement of knowledge: first, advancing the theoryof architectural science; second, advancing thepracticeof architectural science and third a combination of the two. Essentially the paper needs to bring something new to the debate from the theoretical perspective as well as to practice. The aim of this editorial is to examine the papers in this edition from this perspective. This edition examines papers which explore the measurement of environmental factors and their impact on indoor and external environmental quality. The first paper by Baharuddin Hamzah and Stephen Lau is titled, ‘The Development of Visible Sky Area as an Alternative Daylight Assessment Method for High-rise Buildings in Highdensity Urban Environments’. The interesting part of this is the evolution of the high-rise housing in Hong Kong and how economics rather than environmental factors has led to the form of these buildings. These can be up to 60 storeys tall with 8 units per floor in a ‘finger plan’ or ‘star configuration’ to provide air and light wells. The design of these re-entrant spaces is crucial to the environmental conditions within the building. Existing regulations were found to be limiting so a new performance approach has been devised based on the Daylight Factor methodology (Baker and Steemers 2002). The authors support the new approach; however, they disagree with the standards that are being set. In theDaylight Factormethod the internal illuminance is a related to the external illuminance. The illuminance comes from three areas.