The Ise Shrine in the age of solar heating

In my research I came across a number of solar-house-themed cartoons, which never failed to make me smirk or raise an eyebrow.   Here is the most memorable cartoon I encountered: the Ise Shrine, heated by a flat-plate solar-thermal collector.

Hozumi Kazuo
"How would it be to draw off the water from the Isuzu River and utilize the heat from Amaterasu's sun? "
from Kenchiku Bunka (June 1963)

The specific context for the cartoon is a serious debate in Japan about tradition and modernity in the 1950s and 60s.  (The shrine is reconstructed every 20 years, and some of the earlier 20th-century reconstructions had not been perfectly authentic.  Kenzo Tange had suggested in 1959 that it was important for traditional monuments to be destroyed or desecrated sometimes.)

More broadly, the cartoon indicates how solar heating had become a global movement in the 1950s and 60s.  Chapter 9 of The Solar House looks at this theme.

And finally, the cartoonist unwittingly foreshadowed a policy question which is current today --- can historic buildings and landscapes tolerate solar equipment?  For more on the question, see Solar Today, Jan/Feb 2013 (advance to p. 46) and NREL's paper "Implementing Solar PV Projects on Historic Buildings and in Historic Districts" (pdf)

[The cartoon is used without permission from Jonathan M. Reynolds, "Ise Shrine and a Modernist Construction of Japanese Tradition," The Art Bulletin (June 2001). The Kenzo Tange information also comes from that excellent article.]