Solar Orientation and Historic Buildings

When we look at plans of buildings, we are accustomed to two important conventions that indicate the building's orientation: the plan usually has a north-arrow; and north is usually "up," at the top of the page.  However, these are modern conventions, and so it's easy to be misled by looking at old drawings and inferring orientation at a glance. I was reminded of this issue recently while re-reading Dean Hawkes' excellent book Architecture and Climate: An Environmental History of British Architecture, 1600-2000.   

Here's an early engraving of the Chiswick House (London, 1725-29): 

You'd be forgiven if you assumed the front of the house faces south.  (The assumption is not only understandable for reasons of graphic convention, but also because we are now trained, to some extent, to assume 'wisdom' in the environmental strategies of pre-modern architects --- of course they wanted a south-facing porch.)

But as Hawkes mentions (almost parenthetically), the Chiswick House faces south-east.  I've rotated it to show how it might be better-portrayed for modern readers:

And Hawkes also noted that Chiswick's diagonal orientation was derived from Palladio's Villa Rotonda, although the "main entrance" at the Villa Rotonda faces northwest.  Is that a surprise?  (It surprised me ... and I've been there!)  Here is Palladio's canonical drawing: 

The unconscious association of the graphic orthogonality with the cardinal points is amazingly powerful.  You project the drawing onto the world.  Now, here is a more 'accurate' representation of the plan:  

To be clear, this is not to criticize the illustrators (Herisset and Palladio) for orienting their drawings in this manner, or the architects (Lord Burlington and Palladio) for the orientation of the buildings. 

Another famous example, I think, of a historic building with a misunderstood orientation is Hardwick Hall:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/25831000@N08/8049919893/

Hardwick Hall is sometimes cited as a forerunner of passive solar design.  This is the west facade however, not the south. 

Any others?  Please comment below! 

Related: Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation buildings (all of them) were oriented with the building's long axis running north-south, so the units face east-and-west; see Le Corbusier and the Sun.

A Note on Heated Glass

On Treehugger this week, Lloyd Alter noted a new glass product which includes a heating element between the panes, allowing the window to “function as a radiant heating system.” Alter asks: Could this be the least sustainable building product ever invented? In the comment section, Alter says: “I still suspect that a whole lot of  the output of this thing is heating the great outdoors.” 

He’s absolutely correct, and this is worth a bit of discussion because it’s (yet) another example of an issue where green builders would be well-served by knowing their history better.

Le Corbusier figured out that heated glass was a bad idea in the 1930s, or at least he should have. Prior to that, he had been wondering if it would be better to heat and cool the walls of a structure rather than heating and cooling the air inside the rooms. He developed a concept he called the mur neutralisant (neutralizing wall), essentially a double-skin glass wall with an air cavity that was heated or cooled mechanically. He began working with engineers at the American Blower Corporation to demonstrate the practicality of the concept. Those engineers surprised Le Corbusier with their analysis:

“Your proposal will demand approximately four times more steam and more than twice the fan energy to heat and ventilate the building than that which would be necessary with the current methods employed in our country to heat and ventilate a building exposed to the same atmospheric conditions.”

Nevertheless, Le Corbusier used the mur neutralisant in the Cite de Refuge building (Paris, 1930-33), and it was an unmitigated disaster, especially because the cooling could not keep up with summer overheating. The system needed to be replaced within a few years. (To his credit, Le Corbusier next turned his attention to the brise-soleil.)

This is a simplified version of a complex story. More nuance and detail can be found in the following sources:

Harvey Bryan, “Le Corbusier and the ‘Mur Neutralisant’: An Early Experiment in Double Envelope Construction,” Proceedings of the Ninth International PLEA Conference, 1991.

Harris Sobin, “From L’Air Exact to L’Aérateur: Ventilation and its Evolution in the Architectural Work of Le Corbusier,” ACSA Annual Meeting, 1996.

See also: Le Corbusier: a French lesson on ‘Murs neutralisants’

George Löf house, 1956-2013

Sad but not surprising news: the George Löf house—one of the seminal buildings in the history of the solar house and certainly a modernist landmark worthy of protection and preservation—was destroyed sometime recently. I visited the Denver site yesterday and found a large excavation and a foundation (presumably) for a McMansion:

George Löf house site, July 2013

Prior to the demolition, the Löf house was in original condition, including the flat-plate solar collectors (air heaters) on the roof. It had hardly been touched since its construction 57 years ago, not even a coat of paint in my estimation. Here is how it looked when I took an extensive set of photos in September 2011:

George Löf house, Denver, September 2011

At that time the house was vacant and for sale. Löf died in 2009, having lived there for 53 years. Because of the large size of the lot, the condition of the house, and the (wealthy) neighborhood, it was predictable that it would be purchased as a tear-down. At that time I contacted the realtor and local preservation groups to make sure the house’s importance was understood, but obviously to no avail.

As I document and discuss in great detail in the book, the Löf house was remarkable for its technical innovation and for the sympathetic relationship between the architects (James Hunter of Boulder, assisted by Tician Papachristou) and the engineer Löf. The design was celebrated in the New York Times for its heating system and Hunter’s “modern lines.”

The rooftop collectors, still in place in 2011 and just barely visible behind plywood screens, produced hot air which could be sent straight to the rooms of the house, or stored in gravel tubes. The sympathy between architecture and engineering was expressed most beautifully by Hunter's decision to place the cardboard tubes in the staircase in the center of the house, visible from the entrance, and paint them bright red. (And in a wonderfully poetic contrast he formed a concrete chimney from the same type of cardboard tube, and painted the chimney a cool blue as seen above.)

I visited Dr. Löf at the house just a few months before his death. He was bright and we had a long conversation. He gave me the original set of blueprints to the house, and I suspect, sadly, that he recognized that the drawings wouldn't be needed by the next owners of the property.

See the Resources page for more. Also, some additional photos of the Löf house from Historic Denver, Inc., including a set taken in 2010, can be found here. 

Also (newer): Tician Papachristou and the George Löf house

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)​