"Freak Houses Mounted on Turn-tables"

In my research for the book, I came across this curious bit of criticism from Canadian scientist E.A. Allcut from 1945:

"The direct use of solar heat may be extended somewhat, with good results, in specially designed buildings, but it is unlikely that freak houses mounted on turn-tables and operating as rotating solaria will be of immediate importance.  Even if large numbers of these special buildings were constructed, there would still remain the problem of heating the enormously greater number of houses that are already in existence."
(“A Fuel Policy for Canada,” The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, February 1945)

This argument struck me because I couldn't think of ANY freak houses mounted on turn-tables in the solar house movement.  The solar house was a popular concept in 1945, and its basic definition was not freakish: large areas of glass facing south with proper shading.  Non-rotating solar houses were frequently featured in popular magazines and architecture journals.  Most were quite normal-looking.

I finally decided Allcut must have been thinking of the Villa Girasole, a historical oddity with practically no precedent, built near Verona, Italy, in 1929-35.  This large L-shaped building could rotate on a massive turntable-like base.

from http://www.loftenberg.com/revolving-house-in-italy/

The Villa Girasole was the creation of Angelo Invernizzi, a civil engineer who worked for the rail service.  Hence it used a mechanism of railroad wheels, tracks, and gears.  Lewis, Tsurmaki, and Lewis concluded that it “destabilizes and inverts the assumed fixed relationship between building and site.…  an irrational project of rational objectives.”  (Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis: Opportunistic Architecture, Princeton Architectural Press, 2008)

Because Invernizzi named his house Girasole (sunflower), it can certainly be located within the larger category of sun-responsive architecture.  One might assume that that the building would face the sun as it moved across the sky.  But, as Chad Randl has noted, the family occupied the house in summer only, and consequently it was usually turned away from the sun.  (Chad Randl, Revolving Architecture: A History of Buildings that Rotate, Swivel, and Pivot, Princeton Architectural Press, 2008)  Period photos also show heavy exterior window coverings. 

There is no evidence that solar heating played any role in its conception, and it was never touted as a "solar house."

More:
2010 Film: Il Girasole. A House Near Verona (available from University of Chicago Press)
2008 Oliver van Poucke article at Kinetic Architecture (with many images)
2008 Lloyd Alter column at Treehugger

More recent Blog entry:
More thoughts on the Villa Girasole

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The other major revolving structure of this period was the "Solarium Tournant," built in Aix-les-Bains in 1930 by Dr. Jean Saidman as a clinic for tuberculosis and rickets.  The upper platform moved to follow the path of the sun throughout the day.  With the appearance being a cross between a Dutch windmill and an early flying machine, the structure was perhaps even more 'freakish' than the Villa Girasole.

from http://www.flickr.com/photos/aboutrichard/5206466698/in/set-72157625339375031

If Allcut  directed his remark to this structure, he was being deliberately obtuse, since this building had almost nothing in common with the "solar house" as it was understood in the mid 1940s.

More on the Solarium Tournant: http://jlggb.net/blog2/?p=5072 

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Another rotating house not discussed in the book: La Maison Tournante, by François Massau (Wavre, Belgium, 1958) --- too late to be the object of Allcut's remark.

from http://www.lamaisontournante.be/articlepress.html

I find roof especially interesting, but I am at a loss to determine a scientific or environmental reason for its eccentric shape.

Information about this project is scant, but it seems Massau's wife was ill and she needed sunlight and heat for her health. This would again place the building in the genre of sun-responsive architecture, or more accurately heliotherapeutic architecture in the tradition of the tuberculosis sanatorium.  It does not appear to have been an experiment in solar heating for fuel savings.

Massau was in the coal business; neither an architect or engineer.  Apparently he built three rotating houses and they all remain working.

More: New York Times

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Finally, in her 2005 article "What Tuberculosis did for Modernism" (Medical History), Margaret Campbell briefly discussed the phenomenon of Revolving Summer Houses, which were popular among the Dutch and elsewhere in Northern Europe in the early 20th century.  These were typically small, one-room structures built for therapeutic purposes.  Again, they were never part of the future trajectory of solar-heated architecture, and could not have been on Allcut's mind when he made his curious remark.

Revolving summer house (1925) in Edinburgh. From "What Tuberculosis did for Modernism" by Margaret Campbell (Medical History, 2005).

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.