Houses of Tomorrow exhibition

Updated: The talk can be seen online here.

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I’m happy to promote the exhibition “Houses of Tomorrow: Solar Homes from Keck to Today,” at the Elmhurst Art Museum (outside Chicago) now until May 29. Details here.

I’m confident it’s an interesting and well-organized show. The museum’s curators consulted me when they were conceiving the exhibition and I was happy to give them some feedback. The exhibition begins with Keck’s “House of Tomorrow” for the 1933 Century of Progress International Exposition, an all-glass house where Keck inadvertently ‘discovered’ the magnitude of passive solar heating. My book The Solar House (see right sidebar) includes a great deal of analysis of this discovery and of Keck’s subsequent solar houses and their importance.

I’ll be giving a talk on these matters for the museum on April 7, 2022. I’m excited and honored to be cooperating with historian Robert Boyce, the author of Keck & Keck: The Poetics of Comfort (Princeton Architectural Press, 1993). He’s the authority on Fred & Bill Keck, and I’ll probably try to close my mouth and listen!

Finally, it is fitting that the Elmhurst Art Museum is partially located in a glass house: the McCormick House by Mies van der Rohe (1952).