Evaluation of the lighting design of an economic housing project using WELL Rating System (Study Case: Housing and Development Bank Building in New Damietta)

Since the last decade, the Egyptian government has established several social housing projects to meet the growing demand for real estate and solve the housing problem nationwide (Saftawy 2019). Among these housing projects is the "Housing and Development Bank" project in New Damietta, which targets the middle and low-income social housing category. The existing residential units are currently fully finished and ready for use, and all electrical installations and internal and external lamps are almost uniform and pre-installed for all residential units.  This study examines the performance of the design of external lighting and  its health impact on some residents of residential units within it in the case of the study and also examines  the performance of interior lighting design (new 2022). During the past years, the importance of hygienic design of buildings has emerged after the increasing phenomenon of sick building syndrome (Ashour 2014), which led to a decline in the productivity of users and affected their physical and mental performance. Because of the design of the buildings in which they work/reside. In the beginning the interest was It focuses on administrative and office buildings because the productivity of employees was translated directly into profits for employers, but later the importance of healthy design of residential buildings appeared, as the productivity of the employee is affected by the factors that affect the quality of his sleep and life in the hours spent at home also before arriving at work, hence the need for an approved evaluation standard that evaluates the performance of buildings in terms of health and its impact on the health, performance and psychology of users.  The WELL Rating System, launched by  IWBI (International WELL Building Institute) in 2017 (IWBI Delos Living LLC 2016), and the research measurement tool  "WELL v2 Rating System", released in 2020, are released as the second version of WELL Building Standard TM.  The research problem lies in the architects' disregard for the question of the effect of night outdoor lighting on the interior spaces of the rooms facing them when studying and designing residential projects (Bunjongjit and Ngaopitakkul 2018) social in the study area. The problem also came in the failure to evaluate the lighting design with the WELL classification system when studying and designing economic residential projects. The importance of research In that it seeks to achieve visual considerations when designing residential buildings, the most important of which is the exposure of facades to external artificial lighting that affects the internal spaces facing them, which provides psychological stability for their occupants and related to their health, and highlighting the importance of integrating sustainable and human-centered lighting solutions with the WELL classification system  and  achieving some of the sustainable development goals 2030. This study aims to evaluate the  sample housing in New Damietta City using  the WELL  classification system to evaluate its performance on users in terms of designing good external and internal lighting, and to make proposals to improve the design of external and internal industrial lighting for better performance of the building, and taking into account the health and psychology of users, where  three-dimensional models were created to simulate the state of the study and lighting using Computer programs for various simulations with their various versions, namely Revit,  Relux  and DIALux (Das, Mondal, and Ghosh 2021),  then the data were discussed and analyzed, to examine the health effects of lighting design on the population in the case of the study. Several results were reached,   including proposing alternatives to control the glare of the external light entering the bedrooms with samples, making adjustments to the window materials And change the types of lighting in the lighting poles to ensure the best performance of the sleep cycle system for all residents.The results of the research were reached, where most of the lighting standards of the WELL classification were not met, and  several negatives were reached in the  outer shell of the study case building (G.G.E.W. et al. 2020), so the optimal solution was proposed, which is to rebuild the outer shell by changing building materials, colors, openings, ceilings and lighting of both types (Daugaard et al. 2019), and the study recommended Working on finding local (Egyptian) standards through which to ensure the evaluation of sustainable residential buildings guided by  the classification WELL to  improve lighting performance related to health in housing, and the establishment of a lighting plan linked to the design of the building so as to achieve the standards.