Tools: Whit Smith's solar tool

Update: Outside In: The Architecture of Smith and Williams is available at Amazon here and through the Getty here. My contribution is called "No Coincidence: Whitney Smith and Japanese Influences at Midcentury."

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This weekend is the closing of an excellent exhibit at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara: Outside In: The Architecture of Smith and Williams. In 2012 I was invited by curators Jocelyn Gibbs and Christina Chiang to assist in conceiving the exhibit and to write an essay for the catalog. They did an excellent job, and I was surprised at the breadth of Smith & Williams' work.

At the time I began to examine the Smith & Williams archive at UCSB, I had finished the Solar House manuscript and Rizzoli was designing the book. I didn't imagine there would be any crossover between the two subjects. Whit Smith was not a 'solar architect' in the sense of exploring new methods of heating.

So imagine my surprise when I found this in his archive:

A 'homemade' tool to determine solar angles! Smith apparently took the graphic information, blueprinted it, affixed it to bristol board, then attached a cork handle to a small axle and pivot point, allowing the dial to spin freely. (It's not clear to me why the spinning function would be useful.)   

Where did the he find the graphic information? I recognized the chart (called a cotangent diagram) as having come from an article called "Orientation for Sunshine" in Architectural Forum in June 1938. Then I found a mimeographed copy of that article in Smith's folders.

Note that Smith began with the data for 40°N latitude, then penciled in the new coordinates for Pasadena (34°N). The article included the detailed procedure for doing so.

The Forum article of 1938, uncredited but surely written by Henry N. Wright, was a major milestone in solar house history. This information was virtually impossible for architects to find prior to then, and it remained difficult to find later. For much more on Henry N. Wright's importance, see Chapter 5 of The Solar House.

Whit Smith did not use his tool to make solar-heated houses, but to achieve proper orientation and shading so that his houses would not overheat. He also liked to allow morning sun into his kitchens. This is clear evidence that the emerging science of solar heating had a wider impact on the profession at large at midcentury.  

Tuberculosis and Solar Architecture (part 1)

In Public Housing and the ‘Thermal Ghetto’, I discussed Fred Keck's use of a single-loaded corridor to create all-south-facing units for the Prairie Avenue Courts, a 1950 public housing project in Chicago.

When Keck designed the plan, he might have been influenced by the Lake County Tuberculosis Sanatorium by William Ganster and William Pereira (Waukegan, Illinois, 1939), a spectacular American example of what I call heliotherapeutic architecture.  The similarities in plan are striking:

George Fred Keck
Prairie Avenue Courts
from Progressive Architecture, April 1951

William Ganster and William Pereira
Lake County Tuberculosis Sanatorium
from Built in USA: 1932-1944 (1944)

Originally, I had written a chapter on the subject of heliotherapeutic architecture, but it needed to be cut from the book during editing for length.  This included an examination of the sanatorium movement in Europe, including examples such as Les Frênes, the Zonnestraal Tuberculosis Sanatorium, and Aalto’s Paimo Sanatorium.  These are fascinating structures and I'll blog about them in the future.  (Sunlight, fresh air, and rest were the most effective treatment for tuberculosis before the advent of antibiotics, and it is generally well-understood that the aesthetic development of modern architecture was predicated on medical concerns of sanitation and heliotherapy.)  The larger point is that heliotherapeutic architecture, using sunlight for health, was essentially distinct from the solar house movement, which used sunlight specifically for space heating and energy savings.

The Lake County Tuberculosis Sanatorium is not only one of the finest examples of its type, in America and beyond, as it transformed and refined influences from Duiker and Aalto, but it also was the only example I've found where the distinction between heliotherapeutic architecture and solar-heated architecture may have become blurred.  The Lake County building was later highlighted in an article about solar houses and touted for its energy savings.  Reader’s Digest reported that the sanatorium, while curing its patients, was “built on solar principles” and saved about 30% on heating costs (“The Proven Merit of a Solar Home,” Reader’s Digest, January 1944).  Still, there is no evidence that space heating had been an objective of the designers; it was probably an incidental benefit. 

Conversely, as discussed in the book, some appraisals of solar houses (particularly those by clients) spoke of lifestyle and health benefits in addition to energy savings.

Lake County Tuberculosis Sanatorium
photo by Hedrich-Blessing
from Built in USA: 1932-1944 (1944)​

Public Housing and the ‘Thermal Ghetto’

In The Solar House I borrowed David Gissen's excellent concept of the ‘thermal ghetto’ to briefly discuss an issue in public housing that Fred Keck addressed beginning in 1950.  Gissen coined this term to discuss how low-income urban dwellers usually lack access to air-conditioning and disproportionately suffer heat-related deaths.*

Another type of ‘thermal ghetto’ is often produced in multifamily housing projects: when the building is extended east-west for proper orientation and a double-loaded corridor is used, half the residents are banished to a ‘thermal ghetto’ on the north, where they rarely see direct sunlight and the units are cold and dark, with high heating bills.  This was a common condition through the 20th century.  Keck wanted to avoid this type of ‘thermal ghetto’ when he designed the Prairie Avenue Courts, a superblock-type public housing project.  Keck wanted all of the the units to face south, so he needed to fight for a single-loaded corridor plan.  Keck developed a few solutions, the best of which is shown below.  In effect he treated the project like a large solar house (shading devices on the south façade are not shown). 

George Fred Keck
Prairie Avenue Courts
from Progressive Architecture, April 1951

Keck's plan was clearly influenced by Le Corbusier's Pavillion Suisse; (see Le Corbusier and the Sun).

In the book I note that the 'outside corridors' were unfortunately enclosed in chain-link, and I quote Stanley Tigerman's colorful critique of that problem.  The project was demolished in 2002.

If you're interested in this subject, you'll also be interested in Zeilenbau orientation and Heliotropic housing.

*David Gissen, “Thermopolis: Conceptualizing Environmental Technologies in the Urban Sphere,” Journal of Architectural Education, 2006.

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And here's an anecdote from England which shows that south-facing public housing can also become a 'thermal ghetto', in summer, if the design does not include shading (or air-conditioning).

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.]

Lawrence B. Anderson on Air Conditioning

One of the important recurring themes in the history of the solar house, ironically, was the advent of air conditioning. In the book I discuss how the solar house and the all-glass house (requiring air conditioning) developed in parallel although they were fundamentally opposed in concept.

The architects who truly contributed to the solar house movement were modernists, and so most of them sought to control the indoor environment and embraced emerging science-based standards of comfort. But they were interested in saving energy, and so they were troubled by the increasing reliance on air conditioning. 

Lawrence B. Anderson is an important character in the book and one of those prescient critics of architecture's over-reliance on mechanical systems. Anderson was  the Head of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for decades at mid-century and designer of MIT's Solar House IV. In 1959 he wrote:

“Comfort is desirable; the mechanisms for achieving it threaten to strangle our art.

The honeymoon is over in air conditioning. A large surtax of dollars and space now penalizes almost every building project. We have come to rely on gadgets instead of using our brains to outwit the climate by shading, insulation, breezes, and other adaptations that used to give regional character. Much of our time is spent trying to balance budgets that are forty per cent mechanical equipment, and the rest of it goes toward figuring out where to put all the motors, fans, valves, ducts, transformers, filters, pumps, dampers, pipes, traps, vents, grilles, compressors, and access panels.

The brightest engineers got bored with environmental control before the architects. They regard these problems as having been solved years ago, and are now at work on rocketry. We are left with a great proliferation of devices that work some of the time, but no very sophisticated advice on how to arrange them for effective use.”

Our stereotype—mostly true—is that architecture in the 1950s paid little attention to proper envelope design and passive strategies while it fully embraced the advent of air conditioning. (See Gail Cooper's Air-Conditioning America for the larger story.) But a vocal minority of architects like Anderson swam against the powerful tide, and their resistance, in fact a form of social protest, should not be forgotten.

[Anderson quote from  "The Architect in the Next Fifty Years," Journal of Architectural Education, Spring 1959.]