Best of 2019

My annual “Best of …” always highlights architecture I visited during the year. What a year 2019 was! I’ve already blogged about these: Sir Walter Scott’s Abbotsford, Coal Drops Yard, Notre-Dame du Raincy, The Borohus Virkesmagasin, Jacobsen's SAS Hotel. But there was much more…

The Kelpies
Andy Scott’s monumental sculptures in the Scottish Borders region just knocked my socks off. Scale is a big part of the impression—they are about 100 feet tall—but the experience gains its impact from the changing relationship between the two figures as you walk, and the negative space which opens up between them. Powerful! This effect is supported by the excellent site planning, landscape design, and the understated visitors’ center.

Scott’s sculptures are part of a larger project which restored the Forth and Clyde canal system, a product of the industrial age which had been dormant since the 1930s. Kelpies are mythological water-horses, and the two figures form a gateway for the canal, as they sit astride a new lock and turning pool. The nearby Falkirk Wheel, also impressive, was part of the same canal revitalization effort. We learned the canal has been a tremendous success as a site for tourism and recreation, and to my mind it’s a great example of how a historical landscape can be revitalized with new functions and new structures.

Bruno Mathsson furniture showroom
Do you know about Bruno Mathsson, the Swedish architect and furniture designer? The Museum of Modern Art collected his bentwood furniture in the 1930s, and the Kaufmann family had a Mathsson chair at Fallingwater. In 1950, in Värnamo, Mathsson built a California-influenced showroom for his pieces. Dwell magazine called it “a Perfect Midcentury Time Capsule”—I agree!

Petit Trianon
As usual I spent 4 weeks in Europe with students in the summer. I had been to Versailles a few times before, but somehow I had never made the trek out to experience the Petit Trianon (Ange-Jacques Gabriel, 1762–68) and its landscape. While I am not especially fluent in the full sophistication of classical architecture, there is something deeply right about the composition and proportions here. And I was moved by the relative emptiness of the interiors, knowing what we know about Marie Antoinette and the scattering of her furniture.

London offices
In London it’s typical for us to visit some of the top architectural and engineering firms; among our regulars are Arup, Buro Happold, Zaha Hadid, Cullinan Studio, and SOM. Thank you to them! In 2019 we added Hopkins Architects, Heatherwick Studio, and Make Architects. Hopkins was a particular highlight for me, because I just love the work. I don’t take a lot of pictures during these visits, but Heatherwick’s people encouraged us, so here’s a look.

Sir David Adjaye x2
In the Spring I visited David Adjaye’s National Museum of African American History, a proud addition to the National Mall, and in June I saw his fascinating ‘Making Memory’ exhibition at the Design Museum in London. It seems to me he’s working towards an agenda which is fundamentally different than everyone else. A surface reading would tell you it’s about identity; but that’s too trite. There’s something else important going on in Adjaye’s work that I can’t quite locate yet.

Bonus: Lloyd’s of London
I’d studied it from the outside a dozen times, but never been in before. Lifetime achievement unlocked!

Thanks for Visiting
solarhousehistory.com had 18,500 pageviews in 2019. That's about 50 per day.
The most popular blog topics were:
Le Corbusier and the Sun (2,400 pageviews)
Nixon’s Energy Policy (1,360)
Edison’s Famous Quote (800)
Zeilenbau orientation and Heliotropic housing (540)
Jørn Utzon’s sun-responsive houses (470)
Solarpunk (440)

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Best of 2018
Best of 2017
Best of 2016
Best of 2015
The Solar House: 2013 Year in Review

Saved: The Ball-Paylore House

Some fantastic news for solar house history: the iconic Ball-Paylore House (Arthur T. Brown, Tucson, 1950–52) has been purchased by the Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation and is under restoration. More information here. Contributions are needed!

In The Solar House I wrote quite a bit about Brown as “Tucson’s pioneer of solar design,” with several paragraphs about the Ball-Paylore House, including this passage:

[Brown] developed a novel shading strategy using circular “revolving porches.”  These were movable shades connected to the house which rolled on casters at the rim of the patio slab and a track in the eave line.  The homeowners could shield the house from direct sun throughout the day, or admit the sun when heating was needed.  In essence, the house was conceived as a kinetic solar mechanism, compelling for its ‘lyrical’ qualities.

I concluded the Ball-Paylore House “demonstrate[d] an environmental sensitivity that is usually not associated with 1950s architecture.”

Here is an image from the Maynard L. Parker archive at the The Huntington Library (link).

Sir Walter Scott's Abbotsford

In October I was fortunate to spend an overnight visit at Abbotsford, the home of Sir Walter Scott, in the Scottish Borders region south of Edinburgh. Scott called it Abbotsford because monks from the nearby Melrose Abbey crossed the River Tweed here centuries ago. It is truly a medieval fantasy—picturesque!

Scott built Abbotsford, with architect William Atkinson, from 1817–23. It is usually described as the Scottish Baronial style, and a “castle-in-miniature.” But forget the labels: this is all Sir Walter Scott, whose contribution to literature is noted for blending fictional imagination with historical fact. Indeed, the house includes some fragments from Melrose Abbey as well as countless medieval weapons and other artifacts.

Funny: Nathaniel Hawthorne visited later and found it to be “no castle, nor even a large manor-house.”

I was interested to find some ‘modern’ features at Abbotsford too. Scott had an early form of gas lighting in his library. And a charming glass-roofed orangery, seen below.

Solterrassen

https://www.skanska.se/om-skanska/press/nyheter/skanskas-boklok-och-nya-hem-far-pris-for-att-ha-sveriges-nojdaste-kunder/

I’m always interested by architecture which is identified with the sun. Here’s a new example in an unexpected place.

Solterrassen—“The Sun Terrace”—is a multifamily housing project in Umeå, Sweden. It was named the Best Housing Project of 2018 by a Swedish construction industry group, which based its rankings on customer satisfaction. It was built by the giant construction firm Skanska. The architect is credited as Moa Öster of Tyréns. There are 42 units.

Now, Umeå is not a solar paradise; it’s above 63°N latitude, a few hours’ drive from the Arctic Circle! (Map below.) In December Umeå residents get less than 5 hours of sunlight each day, and almost no insolation (link). The building is oriented so that the terraces face Southwest.

Like most Swedish housing, the project is serviced by district heating (centrally-produced hot water), with spaces heated by radiators or heated floors. The project was certified under Svanen Miljömärkt, the “Nordic Swan Ecolabel” for housing, which requires the building use 85% of the energy benchmark in Sweden’s already-strict code.

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More: Solterrassen information brochure (pdf)

A Question of Balance

In the 1970s Buckminster Fuller liked to ask architects “How much does your building weigh?” He advocated for using the minimum amount of material to fulfill the purpose. In other words he held an ideological position about materials, the ideology of maximum efficiency. Fuller’s Montreal Biosphere is shown above; it is about the lightest structure you can imagine. Ultimately Fuller was concerned with sustainability.

Today—also in the name of sustainability—some architects are advocating the opposite, for buildings to be as heavy as possible. This is because encapsulating timber in buildings is seen as a form of carbon sequestration (though this is in question). Mass Timber construction, using Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT), does not aim for material efficiency; there’s a lot more wood than needed in the image above. This too is an ideological position. 20 or 30 years ago the ideology about timber was quite the opposite.

So should your building be super-light or super-heavy? In the framework above, it depends on the material. But more broadly, it depends on your goals and all kinds of contingent factors. On a question such as building mass, a rigid ideological position, maximum or minimum, simply is not useful. For instance, even when building in steel, it might be sensible to ‘overstructure’ the building in the name of sustainability so that it will have greater potential to be changed in the future and have a longer lifespan. When building in timber, you might wish to build with less material as a basic matter of frugality and economy. In my view most architectural decisions should be situational rather than ideological, and most often it will be a question of balance.

Finally, an additional paradox: ideological buildings tend to seem historically significant in retrospect, I think, while buildings that represent situational ethics have a harder time entering the canon, as they are more difficult to understand and interpret. (Please comment if you disagree!)

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Image credits:
Left: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Biosph%C3%A8re_Montr%C3%A9al.jpg
Right: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/timber-future-wood-construction-180960455/