Keck's Duncan house: a new look

Here's a rarely-seen period photo of Fred Keck's house for Hugh and Minna Duncan (Flossmoor, Illinois, 1941). In The Solar House the Duncan house is presented in great detail, but this photo did not make it into the book. 

Hugh is outside shoveling snow in his winter clothes, while Minna is enjoying the solar-heated living room in her shirtsleeves.  Note the concrete floor.  You can catch a glimpse of the exterior "adjustable vanes" (for shading) directly above the book Minna is holding, behind the drapes.  It's a wonderful artifact from the history of the passive solar house.

Finally, I will note that the caption on the back clearly indicates that the house overheated.  Overheating was an important theme in the history of the solar house, and it remains a concern for designers who want to use passive solar and "Passivhaus" methods today.  Someone will someday write the history of overheating, and the Duncan house clearly can be a canonical example.

For a bit more on Hugh Duncan and the IIT study of the house, see User Behavior.  Incidentally, Duncan was a University of Chicago sociologist, and he wrote a large, fascinating book about architecture: Culture and Democracy: The Struggle for Form in Society and Architecture in Chicago and the Middle West During the Life and Times of Louis H. Sullivan (1965).

Also previously on the blog: Keck's Sloan house II: a new look

Simple Victorian Engineering

Peter Rumsey is one of the smartest mechanical engineers working, and a key figure in the green building movement. Here's his website. I like Peter because he advocates for “Simple Victorian Engineering.”¹ In a discipline where increasing complexity is taken for granted, this is a big idea.

What does he mean by Simple Victorian Engineering? Rumsey's project shown above---the Global Ecology Research Center at Stanford, architecture by EHDD²---gives a good indication. The design uses a prominent chimney element, which is a down-draft evaporative cooling tower with a water-spray inside. It relies on buoyancy forces, rather than fan power, to pull cool air into the building when needed. It is, as Rumsey says, "elegant and efficient." It also gives the building an architectural feature which expresses how the building works.

To see the connection to Victorian engineering, let's take the Johns Hopkins Hospital as a representative example. (I'm cherry-picking because my friends Alistair Fair and Alan Short have recently written some excellent new scholarship about the hospital complex³ and because the Isolating Ward is such an excellent aesthetic statement about ventilation as seen below.) In this building, fresh air was delivered to the patient rooms through ventilating louvers in the walls, with heating coils, being drawn in as the "foul" air was pulled up and out by the convective force of the tall chimneys which included "accelerating steam coils."⁴ In other words, the building uses the forces of buoyancy to move large amounts of air (2 cubic feet per person per second!) when electric fan power did not yet exist.

Isolating Ward at Johns Hopkins Hospital, c. 1876 (link to image at Wikimedia)

I'm not sure that most Victorian-engineered buildings were "simple" or low-energy.  Think about all of the construction complexity in those chimneys and steam coils above!  But I understand that Rumsey's point is more about returning to first principles, freshman engineering concepts, than about mimicking Victorian buildings directly.  After all, Rumsey's chimney works in the opposite direction.

Another thinker who is making the connection between Victorian engineering and the current green building movement is Vidar Lerum, professor at the University of Illinois and author of the new book Sustainable Building Design: Learning from nineteenth-century innovations.  This books studies 10 examples of Victorian Engineering (in excellent detail) and 16 recent examples of low-energy architecture.  The cleverly-illustrated book cover shows the Natural History Museum, London, juxtaposed with the Powerhouse One building in Trondheim.

This is a very good book and I hope to write more about it.  Lerum is not a historian and fully admits to “nonchalantly leapfrogging the twentieth [century].”  It's a bold intellectual move to jump from 1897 to 2007, as he does, skipping over the period of Modern architecture (and the modern science of solar heating).

As a historian it is both interesting and a bit curious to see these efforts to connect Victorian engineering and the green building movement or low-energy buildings today.  It seems to me there are two ways to think about Victorian engineering: 1) This way, as Rumsey and Lerum do, offering lessons which can lead us to a low-energy future, or; 2) practically the opposite, as the beginning of the era of "applied power," mechanical control, and high energy use.  Reyner Banham represented Victorian engineering this second way in his influential The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (1969).  What a fascinating duality!  I'm intrigued by the likelihood that both interpretations are valid.

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¹I first heard Peter use the phrase “Simple Victorian Engineering” in a meeting here at the University of Wyoming in about 2010 when he was part of a team competing for a new building commission. (They did not get the job, unfortunately.) Here's a 2010 presentation by Rumsey (pdf) where he uses the concept.
²RMI case study (pdf)
³C. Alan Short, et al. "Functional recovery of a resilient hospital type." Building Research & Information, (2014).
⁴Described here.

Solar Futures: The View from 1952

The history of solar energy is full of predictions or "possibilities" that were not realized and appear in retrospect to have been too-wishful.  Here's an example which I mentioned in The Solar House.  In 1952, the Paley Commission completed a five-volume report entitled Resources for Freedom, which predicted future oil shortages, warned against dependence on imports, and recommended a national energy agency.  It included a section called “The Possibilities of Solar Energy”, written by Palmer Putnam:

"Of new dwelling units to be built in the United States by 1975 ... functionally designed for solar heating ... the maximum plausible market may be more than 13 million installations ... supporting about 10 percent of the national energy system."

In fact, by 1975, solar energy was such an insignificant fraction of the national energy supply that it could not be quantified (pdf source), although this type of analysis is subject to The Clothesline Paradox.

Previously:
Solar Futures: The View from 1978
Solar Futures: The View from 1973

Shakespeare's solar geometry

My friend John Perlin is a leading expert regarding ancient peoples' knowledge of solar principles.  He recently alerted me to this passage in Shakespeare's The Life and Death of Julius Caesar (1695).

source: archive.org

Perlin is impressed by Shakespeare's high awareness of solar geometry.  Casca tells Decius Brutus, Cinna, and Cassius that the sun rises South-of-east (in Winter), but in the "youthful season" (Spring) it will rise North-of-east.

Perlin wrote the excellent Let It Shine: The 6,000-Year Story of Solar Energy (2013), which built upon and revised his landmark A Golden Thread: 2500 Years of Solar Architecture and Technology (1980).

Sunlight Towers, Lawrence Kocher, 1929

Here's an interesting project which was sun-responsive but not solar heated.  Therefore I place projects like this in the category of heliotherapeutic architecture as distinct from solar architecture.  (This is not a value judgement; it discerns that the architecture is not concerned with solar heating and therefore not designed strategically with regard to orientation and solar geometry.  Kocher is interested in sunlight for health and hygiene.)

The fact that Sunlight Towers was was sun-responsive but not solar heated is indicated by the large amount of glass, with corner windows in all major rooms, placed in every direction, irrespective of orientation.  Kocher oriented the towers at forty-five degree angles to the urban grid.  He sought daylight (and cross-ventilation) but did not optimize to gather solar heat and protect against the cold north.  This is classic 1920s architecture, influenced by the sanatorium movement and Le Corbusier.

The project was not built.  This was published in Architectural Record in March 1929 (just before the Great Depression).

Had it been built, it would have used a large amount of energy, and it would have been quite uncomfortable, by later standards.

See also: Le Corbusier and the Sun