Harold Orr Honored

Just a quick note to mention that Harold Orr was inducted as a member of the Order of Canada last week—a very high honor. Orr, a mechanical engineer, was a key figure in energy-efficient housing in the 1970s, and a member of the team* that built the seminal Saskatchewan Conservation House (1977). In The Solar House I describe the Saskatchewan project as a pivotal historical development when superinsulation and airtightness became more important strategies than passive solar heating and thermal mass. The Saskatchewan Conservation Home is now recognized as an important forerunner of the Passivhaus movement.

In recent years Orr has continued to emphasize the importance of airtight construction for energy efficiency. Did Harold Orr invent the blower door? He says so, here (pdf). I believe it’s more accurate to say that he improved upon fan depressurization methods first developed in Sweden by Arne Elmroth, Ake Blomsterberg and Johnny Kronvall.

Harold Orr’s name is always accompanied by ‘pioneer’, and that is well-deserved! He also received the Pioneer Award at the International Passive House Conference in 2015. By extension, the Order of Canada award offers some welcome recognition for the green building community and its history.

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*The team included:
Project Manager: David Eyre
Ir. E. Hendrik Grolle, Grolle Architect and Engineer
From Saskatchewan Research Council: Dave Jennings, Bernard McArthy, Deryl Thompson
From National Research Council: Harold Orr
From Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Univ. of Saskatchewan: Robert W. Besant, Robert S. Dumont, Greg Schoneau, Dick Van Ee

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Much more about the Saskatchewan Conservation Home on the Resources page.
Previously on the blog: The Saskatchewan Conservation House: Aesthetic Questions

Solarpunk heritage: The Dimetrodon

If you’re into Solarpunk today, you ought to be interested in the Solarpunks of the 1960s and 70s. They didn’t call themselves Solarpunks, but they believed in many of the things that characterize the movement today as I interpret it—optimism, DIY technology, experimental culture, and a communitarian spirit.

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The Dimetrodon is a prehistoric creature (Wikipedia). It also gave its name to a “bizarro” instance of solar-hippie-communal architecture built in Vermont in 1971.

Image credit: Collective Quarterly

The Dimetrodon was built by Bill Maclay, Jim Sanford, and Dick Travers. It was a multi-family community using solar, wind and wood energy systems.” Maclay, still practicing today, says it was “a more environmentally sound pattern for growth” than the dominant pattern based on “suburban sprawl, strip development and the advent of the automobile.”

It was an ad-hoc design, which evolved during construction with the participation of other residents. Sanford, also still practicing as of 2015, told Seth Putnam: “There was no forethought whatsoever. The people who lived there had to subscribe to a common idea, or it wouldn’t have worked.”

Image credit: Collective Quarterly

The Scout says: “Over four decades later these homes are still standing and functioning in Warren, Vermont and have become a model of sustainable living.”

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As a matter of historical perspective and interpretation, I do find the architectural style of the Dimetrodon raises some issues. When solar architecture became associated with eccentric forms, the aesthetics of hippie culture, and/or the appearance of a science experiment in the 1970s, it created a stigma which (I think) contributed to stalling the progress of sustainable architecture in the late 1980s and 1990s. I wrote a bit about this here.

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More: The Fleming Museum has a Flickr page including images of Dimetrodon and other design/build structures from Vermont from the 1964–77 period. Also more photos here.

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Also on the blog: Solarpunk heritage: Peter van Dresser

Best of 2018

At the end of the year I customarily reflect upon my personal architectural experiences from the year past—places I visited and other experiences. I didn’t travel much, so my best of 2018 is pretty modest…

Studio Gang’s New Dorms
Architectural surprises are rare and wonderful. I was in Chicago, in Hyde Park, to walk by Fred Keck’s 3-unit cooperative (where he & Lucy lived with brother Bill & Stella and professor Louis Gottschalk), on the way to the Oriental Institute, when I stumbled on Studio Gang’s new dorms for the University of Chicago (called the Campus North Residential Commons). 3D parametric cladding. Beautiful form-making. It strikes me, somehow, as a descendant of the Bauhaus. I didn’t get inside, but the exterior experience was pretty thrilling.

The Apple Store, Chicago
As I wrote about here, I not only admire the work of Foster + Partners for Apple but think it’s historic. So when I visited Chicago in September I set aside time to visit the Apple Store on the river at Michigan Avenue, just south of the Tribune Tower. What a site!

Was I moved? Well, I was in a hurry, and it’s a store. But surely the best store I’ve visited in some time.

Critique₁: Is the form of the roof meant to refer to the form of an Apple computer? I think yes, and that diminishes the design quality, to me.

Critique₂: Yes there are falling-ice problems. This truly surprises me, because it's my impression that Foster's office is full of pragmatic-thinking technically-oriented people.

The IIT Library
I’d been to Mies van der Rohe’s IIT campus several times (and blogged here and here) but never before had I visited the library. It’s a completely different experience than Mies’ other buildings. The typical Mies building is set on a podium or plaza, but here you descend to the main entry, then you are immediately led up, through the floor, to the main space of the reading room. Note (again) the affinities between Foster & Mies in the supreme authority of the ceiling plane.

The Year in Scholarship
Was it a weak year for architectural history? More likely, I didn’t read enough. Some favorites:

• Cook's Camden: The Making of Modern Housing by Mark Swenarton
• Prefab Housing and the Future of Building: Product to Process by Mathew Aitchison
• “Elementhus” by Scott Hedges
• "Glass buildings..." by Alan Short
• "Against Historic Preservation" by Deborah Berke in the Journal of Architectural Education

And the best news (from late 2017): An Engineer Imagines by Peter Rice is reprinted, and affordable. Thanks, Batsford!

Beyonce’s Louvre
A virtual experience, but certainly architectural and tremendously powerful—Beyonce’s takeover of the Louvre. I bet I’ve watched it a hundred times.

The Last Word
When in Omaha, visit Herbe Sainte and order the Last Word (a Chartreuse-based cocktail).

Thanks for Visiting
solarhousehistory.com had 16,100 pageviews in 2018.  That's about 45 per day.
The most popular blog topics were:
Le Corbusier and the Sun (2,520 pageviews)
The Roman Baths and Solar Heating (630)
Zeilenbau orientation and Heliotropic housing (570)
Solarpunk (330)
Nixon's Energy Policy (320)
Solar Orientation and Historic Buildings (290)
Speculative Redesign: Unité d'Habitation (270)

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Best of 2017
Best of 2016
Best of 2015
The Solar House: 2013 Year in Review

Gregory Ain's Ginoza house

In 2008 my book Gregory Ain: The Modern Home as Social Commentary was published by Rizzoli. It documents Ain’s works and ideas.

Ain’s last project—of minor importance—was a home for William and Midori Ginoza, in 1967 in State College, Pennsylvania. Ain was there for a few years serving as the Department Head of Architecture at Penn State. Apart from the 1950 Museum of Modern Art house, it’s the only project in Ain’s oeuvre outside of California.

The Ginoza house was never photographed, and it was the only Ain project I did not visit before writing the book. When I was able to visit in 2013, the original client Bill Ginoza still lived in the house, at age 99. He passed away earlier this year (link).

Since this house has essentially never been seen before, I thought I would share some photos. It is wonderfully site-responsive, oriented to views of Mount Nittany. Prospect and refuge.

Versailles and the history of the skylight

Anyone interested in architecture’s environmental history will find it puzzling that there is little written about the history of daylighting, or the history of the skylight. Who invented the modern skylight? We don’t know! It probably developed in France in the 18th-century.

The Palace of Versailles helps to define some boundaries for this question. The famous Galerie des Glaces (Hall of Mirrors) has tall windows but not skylights⁠—the skylight did not yet exist. Therefore this room exemplifies state-of-the-art side-lighting techniques for its time. Each tall window on the left of the image below (facing WNW) is matched by a mirror on the right; this works fairly well to distribute light throughout the space. The chandeliers help.

About 150 years later, the Galerie des Batailles (Hall of Wars) was constructed; second image below. By this time, the modern skylight had been introduced.* The skylight was a significant advance, because top-lighting techniques provide better illumination than side-lighting.

The two rooms provide an excellent compare-and-contrast for daylighting designers because they are about the same size and shape, and only a few hundred feet apart. Clearly the later room is brighter and lit evenly.** For history students, this is also a fine compare-and-contrast of the Baroque and Neo-Classical styles.

*An earlier skylight of note is found at the 1784 "La colonne brisée" at Désert de Retz, just a few miles from Versailles. Thomas Jefferson was “enchanted” by this structure, and he built the first skylights in America at Monticello after 1796.
**These rooms are contrasted in David Lee Smith's Environmental Issues for Architecture, though the time interval isn’t mentioned.