Fry did not specifically discuss the motivation for making a "Sun House," or the goals of the project.* Most likely, he was following the general
influence of Le Corbusier in using the sun for aesthetic benefits. (More on Le Corbusier soon.)
There is no evidence that the Sun house was meant to use solar heat for energy savings. Again I am taking pains to distinguish between sun-responsive
architecture (including heliotherapeutic architecture) and solar-heated
architecture. In this sense, the Sun House is not a Solar House.
The Royal Institute of British Architects published solar geometry diagrams in 1933 (first published in America in 1931),
and the Sun House was planned "according to the RIBA diagrams," according to Daniel
Barber.** Fry did not
use those diagrams to create shading for the windows in summer, and it
is reasonable to assume the house overheated on occasion. Since Fry practiced with Walter Gropius from 1934-36, it is clear that the Sun House was also related to Bauhaus studies in solar geometry exhibited at CIAM III in 1930. (Whether Gropius contributed directly to the Sun House is not clear.) In
1936, Fry and Gropius designed an ‘open air school’ for children with tuberculosis
at Papworth, in Cambridge. The project,
with plenty of south-facing glass, was never built, but similar themes appeared
in Gropius & Fry’s Impington Village College (Cambridge, 1939).
Nearly a decade later, in the book Fine Building of 1944, Fry wrote, for the first time, about solar heating:
Sunlight, not
necessarily sunshine, is a form of heating that costs nothing. If dwellings are planned so that the living
quarters face the sun, which in England travels across the sky from east to
west in a high curve in the summer and a low one in the winter, sunlight
entering through generous-sized windows will heat throughout most days of the
year, and the large windows will, on balance let in more heat than they let
out.
By this date, the solar house movement was well-established
in the United States, and the last phrase in particular betrays that Fry followed
Keck's work in Chicago. Still, Fry's late endorsement of solar
heating should not be retroactively applied to the Sun
house or his other work of the 30s. There
are no significant examples of solar-heated architecture in Great Britain
before the mid-1950s.
In his later
work, Fry focused on shading and natural cooling. He collaborated with Le Corbusier on
Chandigarh from 1950 to 1955, and with Jane Drew wrote
Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zone (1956).
*The Architect's Journal, August 13, 1936.
**Daniel Barber, “Tomorrow’s House: Solar Energy and the Suburban Territorial
Project, 1938-1947,” 2011 ACSA
Proceedings.