Bryant Park Solar Mapping

Bryant Park was chosen to test how surrounding urban form influences solar access at the block and surface level. For each subdivided surface block in the park, total annual solar radiation was computed while treating the adjacent buildings as fixed obstructions that cast shadows through the day and across seasons. This isolates the geometric effect of the built context, so sunlight distribution reads mainly as a function of building height, orientation, and street alignment, rather than material or vegetation.

The simulation takes three inputs: the target surface, the obstruction building geometry, and NYC sun-path data. With the surroundings treated as obstructions, the result shows reduced sunlight on the south and west sides and greater exposure toward the central north. Real conditions vary, since trees and smaller structures are not in the model.

One real trade-off was precision against computational capacity: halving the grid-square size quadruples the compute. The finest analysis below costs 64 times the coarsest (4 × 4 × 4).