Abstract

Daylight is one of the indoor environmental qualities that most influence students’ development in learning in a classroom. However, many existing schools do not optimize daylight. Indeed, standardized façade designs result in wasted energy in artificial lighting while daylight could be harvested. This study provides a diagnostic of illuminance levels and their distribution in a typological classroom based on field data for a school in the central-south region of Chile. The government built these schools during the second half of the 20th century, and they are still operational, maintaining the same original façade, with no differentiation regarding orientation. Through simulations, it analyzes potential retrofit strategies to identify the ones that could result in better light distribution and autonomy. Facing a lack of local standards for lighting levels in schools’ classrooms, international standards are used as thresholds for actual lighting levels and a series of retrofit scenarios.