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Comment by RogerL | Hacker News Reader

Because most buildings have a large footprint, and only the offices on the parameter have windows. I am typing from a windowless, interior, private office. It is pretty depressing, but I prefer it to open space (which I could easily get here). Others, of course, like the person we are replying to, would feel differently.

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One of Spolsky's articles pointed out that hotels are also large buildings that manage to get an outside window on every room...

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.

You can do a lot by varying the shape of a building. The office building that I work in is a giant H. I'm next to a window pretty much anywhere I go.

As desirable as windows are, they're also conductors of heat/cold. I'll bet that office is uncomfortable and very expensive to run.

Offices also have janitor storage rooms, elevator shafts, dining rooms, et cetera. They also have meeting rooms, labs, server rooms that can be located in the centre.

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 think that was Spolsky's point. Why weren't they designed that way? They should be.

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.

A bit of a tangent, but this is the reason why there are no real high-rise buildings in Europe (The tallest building in the EU is only 1004 ft high). There are laws that determine the minimum amount of natural light an office should have. Since taller buildings have a larger footprint, at some point the interior offices no longer get the required amount of natural light, meaning they can no longer be used as a work-area, thus making the building uneconomical.

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.

Yes, but higher buildings require a larger footprint. You cannot build a spire the height of the Burj Khalifa (828 m or 2,717 ft) with a floorplan that offers natural light everywhere all the way from the bottom to the top floors.

wat

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

I'm starting to think it's a cultural thing. Why do you and other people think that not having natural light is depressing? When I see people from US or some other countries talking about lighting, they seem to almost worship natural light.

Science says otherwise:

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

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.

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.

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