If you think about it, that analogy doesn't really work. The rooms that guests stay in are almost all along the outside because guests are paying customers. The janitor's storage rooms, room service kitchens, elevator shafts, mechanical access corridors and other such workspaces are located on the inside in the less valuable parts of the building. Not every room has an outside window - only the rooms for VIP's, which is oddly similar to the situation in most office buildings.

Except many of those are new construction that are designed to be long and narrow. Most existing office buildings were not designed that way.

I guess I will just email the architect of my building and tell them they did it wrong. I should have sunlight when?

edit: longer answer - I work in Mountain View, where there is huge competition for buildings thanks to Google. Small companies get the leftovers, and beggers can't be choosers.

Hotels also tend to have extremely long hallways, lots of relatively small floors, and few rooms larger than a bedroom.

This doesn't make sense or I am missing something. If you find a floorplan and it has enough light, and then repeat it upwards, won't every floor have similar amounts of light? In that way high-rises are a GREAT way to have many people working in a single large building with everyone seeing light.

wat

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_Eu...

Science says otherwise:

http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy02osti/30769.pdf

I'm living in Sweden, and at least in the northern parts some people do get clinically depressed during the very long and dark winters. Maybe if you live in e.g. India, southern Europe or Australia, you have enough sun to never really miss it. But when sunlight is scarce, it definitely affect you.

Well, sunlight has a big impact on people.

The the extreme example of this is seasonal depression, which is the reasons Scandinavian countries have very high rates of suicide.

But good scientific studies show most people are effected by lack of sunlight, and it impacts mood and alertness.

Windows in offices is an expensive problem to solve, but as sunlight frequency strip lighting is the same price as the yellow stuff normally seen in offices, I'm surprised we don't use it.