A broad concern in architectural engineering is the psychological impact of the built environment on the occupants and users of those environments. This dissertation addresses that concern by building on the body of work published by Flynn, which focused on the impacts of architectural lighting systems on subjective responses to lighted environments. This project extends the scope of that work and links the results to broader models of environmental response, which propose dimensions of interactions to environments without specifically addressing the roles of architecture and lighting on those interactions. This dissertation builds on the foundation provided by these disparate research areas and bridges between them by broadening the Flynn work while at the same time narrowing the focus of the psychological theories to the impacts of architectural lighted environments.

The project used simulated environments as a means of greatly expanding both the lighting system parameters and the architectural contexts of the lighted environments evaluated, relative to the Flynn research. The project combined MDS data with rating scales and preference judgments as a means to investigate connections between the subjective responses measured and the theories of researchers such as Russell and Kaplan and Kaplan. Four different architectural contexts were examined---an empty room, a café, a lounge, and an office---by a total of 72 human subjects. In each context, 24 stimuli representing different combinations of lighting parameters were tested, with the combinations varying along the dimensions of lighting emphasis (central or perimeter), brightness (bright or dim), and uniformity (uniform or nonuniform).

The results showed the presence of certain universal dimensions of perception of architectural lighted environments, consistent with the Flynn results. Responses to the environments were found to be very consistent with the two-dimensional space proposed by Russell, in which the primary factors of response were arousal and pleasantness. While these findings were largely independent of architectural context, context-specific variations in preference judgments were found, with higher arousal preferred for an office context than for more casual contexts such as a café or lounge.