Using an Art Museum

Note: I wrote this while in Europe with students, for them, and thought others might be interested.

The Wallace Collection, London

Many people find museums difficult, I think, because they feel compelled to shuffle through miles of works one-by-one, stopping to study each of them and dutifully reading every description. Maybe this gets instilled in elementary school somehow. Or maybe it’s what people feel they ought to do. What a terrible experience! Where’s the passion? Where’s the fun?

Instead, consider this advice:

Browse quickly and be pulled. You may move rapidly, perhaps not even breaking stride in a room full of masterpieces. Soon enough, something will grab you. There will be a spark, a connection.  Stop and spend time with that one. Be submissive; stay in that moment of intimate contact as long as you can. You might make a sketch if the spirit moves you, but draw freely without much thought.

Then when the mood is broken and you disengage, stay with that piece that grabbed you and (only then) turn on your analytical brain. Look at the work again. View it from every angle, and multiple distances. Figure out why it pulled you. What is the work’s power? Perhaps it will grab you again!

Then you may start thinking about the usual questions of subject and meaning and technique: what is the artist saying and how is he saying it? (Note: these questions don’t come first! For 99% of the works on display, you don’t care about these questions today.) 

Before reading the museum label, make your own interpretations. Ask what techniques were used to achieve such a powerful effect on you. Take some notes.

You’ve saved the signage for last. Go ahead, but don’t worry about giving the experts’ interpretation too much credence. The description may be interesting, or it may be a worthless detour. It certainly isn’t the point of the experience. For some people a museum visit becomes an endless effort to collect stray facts, as if the brain were meant to store them like an encyclopedia. I bet your own notes will end up being the ones you want.

Now you may take a break. Get a coffee. Don’t feel like you need to keep going forever. A successful museum visit, in my opinion, includes deliberately limiting your intake. If two or three works grab you in an afternoon, that’s plenty. However, while you may disregard the works which do not grab you (for now), do not use this ignorance-by-choice to pass judgment against them. If a piece is in a museum, you can bet it has true merit, and your inability to know that merit at the moment is surely nothing to brag about.

Read more later. You’re still blissfully naive about that piece that grabbed you. It is important, eventually, to know the real answers about subject and meaning. If the real answers differ from your interpretations, you should do the hard work of reconciling the balance sheet. In some cases, after learning more you may end up having a diminished view of that piece which was so powerful when you visited. In most cases, you’ll confirm a new passion.

Finally, come back later. All those other pieces which didn’t grab you the first time are waiting for their chance to try again!

(Update: By contrast, but making the same essential points, the New York Times says “slow down.”)

Alvar Aalto and Solar Geometry

In The Solar House I discuss how modern architects developed a new understanding of the science of solar geometry through drawings.  Studies including solar angles, to determine the spacing of buildings for heliotherapeutic considerations, came out of the Bauhaus in c.1930.  I conclude that the first solar geometry studies made specifically for solar heating (and shading to prevent overheating) were made in late 1937, probably independently, by Keck & Keck and Henry N. Wright.  In addition to those examples, Le Corbusier made such a drawing 1938, as I discuss and show in Le Corbusier and the Sun.

It's possible that Alvar Aalto should be included in that short list.  In a 2012 lecture, British historian Dean Hawkes mentions that he found section drawings of the Villa Mairea with a critical sun angle of 52˚ shown.  This indeed corresponds to noon at the summer solstice in Noormarkku, Finland.  Aalto designed the Villa Mairea in 1938.  (Video here; the pertinent bit starts about 18:42.)  Hawkes is one of my favorite historians, and the full video is well worth the time.

We may never know definitively who drew the first 2D shading diagram, but clearly the convention came of age in 1937-38.

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[Added July 2015]  Aalto used solar geometry diagrams in the design of the Paimio Sanatorium.  The drawing below is undated but made in the 1929-33 period.

To be clear, this is not a shading diagram, as the purpose is to show winter sunlight penetrating deep into the patient rooms for therapeutic purposes, and no shading devices are shown.  In this case Aalto used a sun angle of 34˚.

This drawing was included in the terrific exhibit Alvar Aalto 1898-1976. Organic Architecture, Art and Design, which I saw at the Caixa Forum in Barcelona.  It is also published in the exhibition catalog Alvar Aalto: Second Nature.

For more on the Paimio Sanatorium, see Tuberculosis and Solar Architecture (part 2).

The “Shading Decathlon”?

How in the world does the history of the solar house pertain to a hot dry climate like Palm Springs?  Find out tomorrow!  My talk includes this slide (4 houses from the 2013 Solar Decathlon):

More thoughts on the Villa Girasole

My article “The Villa Girasole and the Limits of Biomimicry” is published in the March issue of Italy's Cameracronica magazine, available here.

In it I suggest that Invernizzi’s revolving house probably overheated and that ‘sunflower’ is probably a metaphor that architects ought to give up. I write: “For most buildings on most days, the problem is not solar access, but solar control.”

I should hasten to add that the general concept of Biomimicry in Architecture—learning and applying principles from nature—is a valid area of exploration, and I endorse it when it works. But to practice Biomimicry in Architecture requires a degree of scientific rigor, or if it is purely figurative it should not be expected to succeed on any level other than formal.

Previously I discussed the Villa Girasole here: “Freak Houses Mounted on Turn-tables”

The Solar Decathlon: Back to Irvine

This week the Department of Energy announced that the 2015 Solar Decathlon will again be sited at the Orange County Great Park in Irvine, California (link).  It will run October 8-18, 2015.  Traditionally, the Decathlon was held in Washington, DC, but moved to Irvine for the 2013 contest.

This is a significant and disappointing decision because it confirms that the contest is about solar electricity, not solar heating.  In Irvine in October, the average temperature is 64˚F, practically room temperature!  (In Washington, DC in October, the average temperature is cooler, though still mild at 59˚F.)

I'm a big supporter of solar electricity, to be sure, but passive solar heating ought to be central to the challenge and to the definition of a 'solar house' and a 'net-zero' house.  Most of the places in the US are not like Irvine in October; they have significant heating demands that can be reduced through passive solar design.  To design an 800-square foot house in Irvine that will use net-zero energy for a week in October is frankly not very difficult. 

Why not hold the contest in Minneapolis a month later?  Perhaps because passive solar heating implies the need for thermal mass, which is contradictory to the need for the houses to be lightweight and transportable.  This is the fundamental paradox of the Solar Decathlon.

As I wrote in The Solar House, the Solar Decathlon has always been oriented to the promotion of PV systems, and it has always endured criticism for failing to reward passive strategies.  But with the decision to return to Irvine, the organizers have raised the stakes by going all-in for solar electricity. 

What remains curious is why so many top universities want to participate in such a naked promotional effort, and why students are willing to have their labor exploited for the PV industry.*  That industry doesn't really need the publicity at this point, and I don't see PV companies turning around and endowing architecture programs.  Kudos to schools like Virginia, Kansas, and Auburn, for investing their capital in more worthwhile house-building projects.

And if the Department of Energy wishes to promote PV to homebuyers in a more realistic setting, why not support the National Solar Tour?

*Then again, I must admit this is an enduring historical theme.  See Your Solar House (1947) and Living With the Sun (1955), where architects did much the same for the glass industry and the Association for Applied Solar Energy (AFASE), respectively.

(Note: Weather data is TMY3 data from Orange County Airport and Reagan National Airport.)